UNCLE • • SAM 

AND 

OLD • WOFkLD 
CONQUERORS 



BY- WM -NORMAN 
GUTHPvIE 



BRENTANO'S 
MANHATTAN 
NEW YORK 
19 15 




Class 






'j^ 



,MMlLi 



Book 



Copyright N". 



COPXRIGHT DEPOSm 



UNCLE SAM AND OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 



UNCLE SAM 

AND 

OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 

being the Seventh Division 

OF 

UNCLE SAM, A SATIRICAL PRELUDE 

BY 

William Norman Guthrie 




BRENTANO'S 
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK 



1915 



4*> 



/<?*'o: 



Copyright 1915 

By Wm. Nobmak Outhrib 

All rights reserved 



NaW YORK 
SHBBWOOD PBB88 




MAR 23 1916 



C1.A427359 



Hebication 

SCo fter tdljam 3 met at **g>etoanee" 

janli hJitft tDftom 3 fjatie fareb eber sfince— 
jnayble QKHeje^t anb J'ar WBt^t, ^utf) anb €a£(t- 
QSHttfiout tofiom ttits( tiab not been conteibeb, 

?[SHtiateber merit tfite toorfc of imagination map tiabe 
JBelongsi of rigfjt, 
jKnb i£i gratefuUp as^critieb. 



FOREWORD 



I. 



TO publish the fragment of a work of imagination would seem 
to argue haste and fear. Why not wait until the work is a 
completed whole before appearing in print? What is good in 
literature can afford to abide its time. It does not depend upon 
the verdict of the contemporary if the author is truly consecrated, 
that is, urges no personal demand. Why should he not selflessly 
devote his life to his ideal even at the risk of appealing post- 
humously to posterity ? 

All such considerations have been conscientiously weighed and 
set aside as irrelevant. This work is the fruit of a life-long pas- 
sion, of an enthusiasm more and more cruelly and clearly compell- 
ing to definite and often most uncongenial utterance. 

What is intended to constitute a challenge to one's people 
should not be the product of any individual as such. What is post- 
humously published is fatally finished beyond further shaping by 
the author^s mind. It should have the living co-operation of the 
contemporary. A national ideal should be therefore projected in 
an unconscious and anonymous co-mentation. The thought and 
the feeling of the many individuals, that is to say, should be caught 
up in a larger social interest, which utters the folk-genius in im- 
perative forms. Some artist should then appear to unify and con- 
trol the spiritual material thus perfected. By this process more or 
less have been actually fashioned the world's greatest masterpieces. 

But to-day we are aU, everywhere, particularly in our country, 
the victims of rapid transit, and of the swift means of indiscriminate 
communication. The individual, the group, the mass are not 
granted the leisure and freedom from self-conscious criticism. The 
reporter, the professional writer, the publicist bring all to the light, 
good and bad, fair and foul — which from some points of view 
may constitute a blessing, but for the slow maturing of deep and 
passionate convictions, without sophisticated supervision or selfish 
consideration of expediency, must seem to the idealist most unfor- 



FOEEWORD 



tunate. How shall a civilized Dew nation to-day arrive at an im- 
perative consciousness of peculiar destiny, have reverence for its 
own gradually revealing genius, interrogate the holy oracles of 
historic life, become aware of the mystical tendencies below the 
level of political will and cheap advantage? 

Our thinking and feeling then, as individuals and as a people, 
carried on shamelessly in the open, violates the laws of the spirit, 
and excludes a priori the Muses. Silent, brooding, meditation, 
evocation, transfiguration are not possible to a people whose glass 
houses have no roofs, whose temples are marts, whose groves are 
show places, whose private retreats are penetrated by the X-ray. 

An author who would fain serve his people, by transmitting to 
them a suggestion of some holy vision, which he believes is forced 
upon him, must attempt to produce artificially as best he can the 
conditions for such prophetic service. He must withdraw and medi- 
tate and wait, and wrestle with the angel, and refuse any blessing 
in the dawn, save the revelation of the wrestler's divine name and 
character. 

He must, after due preparation, having studied the past of his 
people, having got so his running start as it were, abandon him- 
self in the leap forward into the future, at the cost of any ap- 
parent folly or fanatical absurdity. He must also be in constant 
relation with contemporary movements, yet somehow discriminate 
between the significant and insignificant. He must, however, in 
addition, after having imposed upon himself the required technic, 
obtain so far as possible the co-operation of those who like himself 
creatively cherish national ideals, in order that by their expres- 
sions of agreement and difference he may correct what is merely 
idiosyncratic in his vision or method of work, in order that their 
final product may in some measure express the people, and not some 
special set, some class, some peculiar cult, some freakish individual 
reaction to the trend of the times. 

It is not claimed that artificial methods of reproducing the con- 
ditions, out of which spontaneously arose inspired prophecy, will 
secure the desired result : a contemporary utterance, that is to say, 
of the best in a people. The individual who is moved to answer 



FOREWORD 



such a social call may turn out to be inadequate as man or as talent. 
The social-psychological mode of procedure adopted may at first 
prove impractical, erroneous. Nevertheless, it will have been well 
that some individual, however unsuited to the task, should have 
undergone its hazard, that the method, however, blundering, should 
have been applied. There is nothing succeeds better than success 
except a great failure, or a failure in a great effort. Success is 
most of the time due to the undue easiness of the work undertaken, 
the relative lowness of the aim. He who attempts what is truly 
worth while and fails, elicits, provokes and challenges. Others 
will attain for the very reason that he dared and failed. 

It is not by conceit that the impossible is undertaken, for con- 
ceit invariably selects, in its prudent self-regard, the line of least 
resistance. Egomania may attempt the impossible, yet surely fails, 
from a lack of that social co-ordination which only modesty se- 
cures. If there is to be success to-day for genuine prophecy, or 
convinced imaginative preaching to the contemporary, it must 
venture to be independent, to be certain of its call and com- 
mission, to be modest, to appeal for co-operation in the matter of 
definition and artistic expression of common ideas and ideals; to 
be, in a word, strictly democratic, self-subordinating, and yet in- 
sistent in essential faith and demonic will. 

Because the task then is so difficult, the chances of failure so 
many and various, the probable disaster so ridiculous, the reader 
of this book may be sure of the sincerity of the present writer. 
For many years he has lent himself to the enthusiasm that pos- 
sessed him. He has bought his leisure for this, his most real and 
inevitable work, by other work socially useful, which was a by- 
product of the same, or in the nature of preparatory discipline. He 
has resolved now, after much searching of heart, to take the public 
completely into his confidence, and he trusts that the response of 
the reader will be sufficiently articulate and vital to serve as a 
hand-rail, so to say, on the sheer verges of the abysses gaping either 
side of his forward path to a national work. 

This publication is but a section of a preliminary part. It 
might be called the keystone of the arch through which we propose 



FOREWOED 



to enter a greater structure. Its appearance is an evidence of a de- 
sire for criticism, and the expression of sympathy if such be possi- 
ble. It is in itself, while a fragment, complete, provided the gen- 
eral purpose of the entire work be understood, that is, provided the 
correct point of view be taken, demanded by the perspective of the 
picture. Omitting then all personal matter, a brief statement will 
be made which should permit the "gentle or ungentle reader'' to 
approve or censure discreetly, and therefore profitably, unto the 
common good. 

II. 

The United States are singular among the nations in that they 
started adult. They never were an infant nation. The people were 
self-conscious from the beginning; protected by two oceans, they 
fancied themselves irresponsible to the claims of the larger world. 
The enormous extent of our country made the attainment of a def- 
inite common ideal all but impossible, as shown most clearly in our 
prolonged and uncertain revolutionary struggle and our vacillatory 
efforts to set up a general government. During the last half cen- 
tury, the Atlantic as a barrier has well-nigh disappeared, and the 
northern Atlantic states find themselves more or less reduced un- 
awares to a colonial attitude of admiration and imitation, that is of 
spiritual dependence. The Pacific Ocean also has shrunk until the 
Orient all but threatens our sense of security, of ability to main- 
tain in the future our own civilization true to its genius. In 
the great region between the extremes, we are governed more by a 
resentment against old-world leadership, than by a clear conscious- 
ness of our own aspirations. The nation has furthermore to turn 
an inherited curse into a blessing — almost ten per cent, of the 
population being of a different and still dependent race, so that a 
very large section of the country has hardly leisure to think and 
feel independently of one obsessing problem. The belief to-day in 
progressive democracy is threatened by the cult of efficiency, which, 
recognizing the need of discipline, pushes ajar the door for 
exploitation and tyranny. Liberty unto self-government by the best 
in us, has been misinterpreted to large masses of incoming popula- 



FOREWORD 



tion as material self-indulgeiice and political license. Clearly if 
this swift analysis of our peculiar situation be correct, what we 
need is to set going a myth which shall startle or woo us to such 
self-consciousness and self-respect as will save us from unthink- 
ing idiotic self-adulation or from a just as vitiating despondency 
and despair. A people that asks any and every stranger on the 
gang plank for his opinion of a great country and its institutions, 
sorely needs to have its own image projected on a vast scale. 
Spooks are invulnerable and do not resent brickbats or rotten 
eggs. One can always refuse to admit any likeness in the portrait, 
or deny that it is a work of art, and cast the unlucky dauber 
into outer darkness. 

Now a mnh, that shall bring a people to seK-consciousness, 
must be native, popular; not arbitrary, individuaKstically con- 
ceived. The present writer was, therefore, compelled to accept as 
the hero of his myth 'TJncle Sam,^' and adopt as the destination 
of his progress in the spirit, through prosperity and adversity, the 
figure of "Brother Jonathan." How shall Uncle Sam, the pro- 
jection of all that is vital but vulgar in us as a people, the common 
denominator of us all, be transfigured into what is selfless and sub- 
lime, and immortally alluring? When it flashed across the mind 
of the author, the suggestion came not abstract but concrete. He 
beheld him colossal, reaching to the very zenith, against the back- 
ground of our banner, the striated rainbows of eternal stone, the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Uncle Sam had been driven 
from the Atlantic coast, in some time that is not yet, thank God, 
by hordes of unassimilated rebellious peoples. They had been 
robbed of their old-world gods, their folk loyalties and rituals of 
life, but they had been given instead no God other or better than 
their belly, and they had come to conceive of Uncle Sam, the vital 
and vulgar incarnation of a national tradition imposed on them 
by geographic accident, as no longer necessary, and had driven, 
him, indeed, to the last ditch, where they dared not pursue him 
only for lack of knowledge of the precipitous trails. Uncle Sam, 
as one may guess, is a self-complacent grass widower. The wife of 
his youth, the Goddess of Liberty, could, we gather, as he grew in 



FOREWORD 



insolent prosperity, endure him no longer. She had borne him 
five daughters, the sections of the country, by name in the myth. 
Jessamine Magnolia, Priscilla, Hope or Hooplah for short, Minna 
or Minnehaha, and Goldibrass. Uncle Sam has no son ; that is, no 
single national ideal. At least, he thinks he has none, though the 
Goddess of Liberty has borne him one in absence, of whom he 
wots not yet, and for whom he yearns with almost pathetic earnest- 
ness. The canyon, the last ditch, the Grand Canyon, is a strange 
place where anyone is subject, on the least excuse, to immediate 
hallucination. Thoughts there are things in a very shocking sense, 
that appear instantaneously and presume to force themselves on 
the reckless evoker's attention. Any idea, therefore, which Uncle 
Sam may hit upon and momentarily fancy, projects itself for 
dramatic inspection in phantasmal beauty or absurdity. Uncle Sam 
has sought refuge in the last ditch, the great crack of the earth^s 
cooling crust, actuated by a desperate hope or rather life preserva- 
tive instinct. He would fain appeal to the devil. Now the devil 
turns out to be Pan, not Satan ; and Pan turns out to be the revela- 
tion of God as external will, to whom Uncle Sam cannot yield him- 
self, no matter how great his present need. Even a good God, who 
commands, is after all a tyrant, and Uncle Sam rightly refuses to be 
drawn by any but the bands of love. The African, the Indian and 
the Jew, his great problems, turn out to be each in a peculiar way of 
providential service. The son of Uncle Sam manifests himself to 
his father, in the direct last moment, as a Balder the Beautiful, 
as a David to Jonathan, or rather as the Christ-to-be, the divine 
ideal incarnate in a higher, yet natural, man. 

These are the general terms of a popular myth, and appeared 
to the author suddenly after year-long quest, and seemed to him in- 
evitably inherent in the situation, rather than the products of his- 
own temperament or personal will. The action of the myth fell 
spontaneously into three parts, during the first of which Uncle Sam 
was under the spiritual dominion of that spirit which historically 
uttered itself most distinctly in Andrew Jackson, the spread eagle 
patriotism, the big stick, supposedly hickory, yet suspected of be- 
ing papier mache. In the second division. Uncle Sam realizes 



FOKEWOKD 



the pathetically humorous mood of perhaps his deepest imculti- 
vated nature, revealed historically in Abraham Lincoln. Under the 
spell of one who seems fain to take the place of the Goddess of 
Liberty in Uncle Sam^s affection (who is nicknamed Circe, and 
Delilah, and by any other name would be as fair and as dangerous), 
he falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep, so that he lies at the mercy 
of his enemies. His daughters have deserted him for grotesque bride- 
grooms in the same class as the whale of Jonah, or the cathedral 
gargoyle. Only Sambo Hilarious, the negro, kneels terror-stricken 
yet loyal at his head, and brings Brer Rabbit into action, the old 
mythic spirit of the moon, to drive away the narrowing ring of the 
savage woK pack. In the third part Uncle Sam awakes to find him- 
self helpless, encircled by his human enemies, unwilling to accept the 
terms of Pan who alone might help, and finally brought by his son, 
the national ideal revealed to him in his true relation, to accept 
adoption by Hiawatha, and initiation into the aboriginal nature-re- 
ligion, whereby he realizes the last glorious change into that char^ 
acter, which was historically realized in the individual Greorge Wash- 
ington. His enemies hail him now as Brother Jonathan, and the 
curtain drops. 

In such terms as these, on such a scale, naif, impertinent, has the 
myth of Uncle Sam revealed itself to the author. The mode of ex- 
pression which it seemed to necessitate should be naif, fantastic, gro- 
tesque, escaping the fall into the ridiculous by not attempting to 
scale the heights of the sublime. If the dignity and vastness of the 
conception cannot vindicate themselves, no rhetoric surely will se- 
cure for them respect. A huge spectacle, a pageant realized in 
writing, that shall vary from folk song and doggerel to oration and 
epigram or lyric, passing through all varieties of dialogue, sug- 
gested itself imperatively as the only adequate means of expression. 
Accentual verse and poetic prose must mingle. The spirit of 
Americanism must be absorbed, bygone points of view, expressed in 
historic phrases, must jostle racy and latter-day idioms and in- 
solent imaginative slang, the paradox must startle or aggravate, 
the telescope figure must shock, and suggest the unspoken, ay, the 
unspeakable. Plagiarism cannot be thought of. Indeed the in- 



FOREWORD 



dividual author must at once resign himself to the pressing stream 
of the myth, and forego fastidiousness and vanity, making no 
claim whatever to individual originality. 

After having proceeded for some years on these general prin- 
ciples, the writer suspected the generic kinship of his undertaking 
to the boyish lie of Aristophanes, to the Gargantuan high spirits 
of Rabelais. Such affinities, if real, are interesting, and if re- 
alized would constitute no rebuke. The present is child of the 
past, and the future must inevitably be projected in the guise of 
experience. 

III. 

After the scenario of the whole work had been developed in the 
course of three years, and the author approached the stage of the 
writer, he discovered the necessity of prefacing his pageant with a 
satiric prelude, which should explain how there came to be an 
TJncle Sam at all, and what he is, clearly to criticise the past, from 
the instinctive point of view of the American, approving his vital 
self-confidence, yet rebuking his ignorance and insolence. This 
satirical prelude shaped itself in the following fashion : 

I. (Episode) The Sam family in the Grand Canyon. 

II. (Interlude) A great symbolic storm in the Canyon, and 
the Teutonic element in our nature manifested by the God Thor 
and the Christmas tree (the first unforeseen experience of Uncle 
Sam in spectacular revelatory hallucination). 

III. (Episode) The raising of Benjamin Franklin, the teach- 
er of Uncle Sam's youth, and the problem of his integration. The 
resolve to refer the whole matter to a committee of great Ameri- 
cans, necessarily therefore dead. ^'Uncle Bemif' retires to "King- 
dom Come,'' thence to summon the right membership for the com- 
mittee, and suggests that meanwhile Uncle Sam "study history" ! 

IV. (Interlude) Uncle Sam, desiring to be amused, summons 
the "great king who ate grass," and the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar 
appears, with whom Uncle Sam impertinently hobnobs. The God- 



FOEEWORD 



dess Ishtar also then appears, who breaks into hell and out again to 
accomplish her ladylike purpose. All which serves to make clear 
to Uncle Sam that law and piety and feminism, like many other 
modem things, pre-existed his own advent. 

V. (Episode) Colonial history is reviewed in significant per- 
sons who are rejected by Uncle Sam as unsuitable candidates for 
his committee, since they were but transient phases of his national 
beginning. 

VI. (Interlude) During the second absence of ^TJncle Ben- 
ny,^^ who is now in quest of more national figures, he interviews the 
builder of the Great Pyramid, the King Khafra, whose diorite 
statue is one of the treasures of the Louvre, and sees the king- 
god anticipate apotheosis, to crown a system of aristocratic pater- 
nalism. Uncle Sam indignantly drives out the tyrant, summoning 
against him the God of the Demos, of the ITile-mud, Osiris. 

VII. (Episode) Unci© Sam is brought to some degree of self- 
knowledge, finally accepts and instructs his committee, and excited- 
ly witnesses the conflict between the modern expression of efficient 
'Hjenevolent despotism,^' Bismarck, and George Washington, the 
steadfast believer in the unmanifest genius of the people, the 
elicitor of individual initiative by the progressive experience of 
self-government. 

VIII. (Interlude) The night being far spent. Uncle Sam in 
the dawn witnesses the fervent sun worship of the prophet 
Zarathustra. To his amazement, he finds the best of his own old- 
fashioned Puritanism anticipated, and surpassed in ancient Iran, 
and the strange doctrine of the redemption of the devil explains to 
him much of his apparently nonsensical optimism. The demands 
of Zarathustra, however, are so austere, that he refuses to be con- 
verted to the doctrine of the ancient Gathas. 

IX. (Episode) As he is about to call out the family from the 
cave in which they have sought shelter for the night. Uncle Sam 
is visited by three strange inspired geniuses : Blake, Beethoven and 
Turner, each of whom proposes to educate him aesthetically, by 



FOREWORD 



hie own peculiar vision of the Grand Canyon. Uncle Sam refuses 
to surrender what he deems his original view for that of any old- 
world genius, however startling and attractive. 

X. (Postlude) Uncle Sam avenges himself on Blake, Bee- 
thoven and Turner, showing them his original vision of the 
Grand Canyon, the City of the three "B's,'' — Bouncing, Beautiful 
and Beatific, his new Jerusalem, not come down from heaven, but 
which he has erected to suit himself as he believes out of novel ma- 
terials. From the manholes in Uncle Sam's great, preposterous, 
supposedly original New Jerusalem swarm the sons of Jacob, the 
supplanter, who make good their prior claim to it as their very 
own, and propose to retain Uncle Sam as the occupant with his 
family of the porter's lodge. Uncle Sam, who insists that whenever 
he says "it ain't, it ain't," stamps his foot in indignation, and finds 
himself, presto change, back at the mouth of the cave. Sambo 
Hilarious ringing the triangle for breakfast. He is a sadder and a 
wiser national genius, realizing that much, which he supposed 
to be original and self -expressive, is merely an unconscious tradition 
from other ages, and borrowing from an alien race, which he can- 
not assimilate by subjecting his inner life to their arrogant 
dominion. 

IV. 

Such is the bare outline of the Satirical Prelude which lies com- 
pleted in manuscript before the author. The seventh section of the 
prelude, being peculiarly timely, lies now printed before the reader, 
and challenges him, asking for no praise or blame save such as 
shall sincerely get expression after the reader has subjected him- 
self to such spell as the idea of the book may have for him, and may 
manage to be transmitted through the art thereof and style. The 
author cannot hope to please all ; perhaps not even to please many. 
He may unintentionally insult some. He has done his best so far, 
and suggests that the reader do now his best, so as to render com- 
posite authorship perhaps possible even in these self-conscious times 
of ours in America. 



POEEWORD 



To endite satire freely, nay, it would seem insolently, directed 
against one's country, though its government be conducted by dis- 
cussion, lays any author open to charges of spiritual treason, from 
any knave and coward, as well as from every conventionally loyal 
patriot. Only he, however, who burns with a passion for as yet un- 
realizable national ideals would run the risk of such inevitable 
misrepresentation. Surely no honest reader of ^HJncle Sam and 
Old World Conquerors'* will for one instant doubt the urgent and 
ardent longing for greater phases of development in people and 
nation, which have actuated and upheld, and now prompt and up- 
hold the writer, through all very natural self-doubt, ay, and 
through fears also of being an outcast in the eyes of his fellows. 
He cannot but be confessed to labor, however mistakenly per- 
chance, for the birth of a new and nobler patriotism. Truly not a 
New England has been his conception, but a new Europe, or rather 
a super-Europe, in which the "hyphen" will not be anathema, only 
because all and sundry shall, in and through their encouraged 
variety and idiosyncrasy, cherish one common transcendent politi- 
cal faith and social hope. 

William Noeman Guthrie. 



Analytic Table of Contents for 

UNCLE SAM AND OLD WORLD CONQUERORS 

Being the Seventli Dmsion of 

^'UNCLE SAM, A SATIRICAL PRELUDE" 



PAGE 

I. Uncle Sam and His Polyglot Kettle 3^ 

II. His Bbag Song and His Incantation 23- 

III. His Reading of His Nine Doubles 39^ 

IV. His Shadow and His Thbee Yet Invisible Phantom Selves 55 

V. The Final Selection of the Ck)MMnTEE of Pacification. . . 71 

VI. A Nightmare Vision of Old World Conquerors 91 

VII. Uncle Sam's Parting Instructions to His Committee 101 

VIII. The Muse of History, Incognito, and Her Present Day 

Protagonist 119 

IX. Bite-the-Marrow and the Violated Constitution: Scene I. 

of the Bismarck Puppet Show 131 

X. The "Doctored" Telegram, or Military Necessity: Scene 

II. OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 141 

XI. Bite-the-Marrow and Our Bill of High Taxes: Scene III. 

OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 151 

XII. Bite-the-Marrow ant) the Father of His Country: Scene 

IV. OF THE Bismarck Puppet Show 161 

XIII. Uncle Sam's Epilogue to the Puppet Show 173 



I. 

UNCLE SAM AND HIS POLYGLOT KETTLE 



(Samho Hilarious brings a note to Uncle Sam) 
Uncle Sam — ^What are you breaking-in for on this sacred 

situation ? 
Jessamine Magnolia — Hurrah, for the dark Osiris ! 
GrOLDiBRASS — Whose physiognomy scared away King Khafrah! 
Peiscilla — 'With the suggestion of miscegenation. 
Sambo Hilarious — Who's King Khafrah, Boss? All I knoVs, I 

was asked to bring this communication to your attention. 
Jessamine Magnolia — ^A billet-doux from the Lady Circe! 

Wants us all to settle down for the night. 
Uncle Sam — Lucky dog to fetch such perfumed baggage. {Opens 

and reads the letter) So, so. Bad omens in the sky? Tell her 

I'm something of an astrologist myself. Whaf s that blazes 

away yonder? 
Jessamine Magnolia — Jupiter in Capricorn. 
Peiscilla — The kneecap of the grand man, according to Sweden- 

borg. 

Uncle Sam — Good, that means I've got to stay up all night at 
my devotions, and can't rock the baby. And what's that, Jessie ? 

Jessamine Magnolia — ^Venus ! 

Unclb Sam — Ha, sets very early. She's mighty nearly evening 
star. And that true-blue and red broncho-buster? 

Jessamine Magnolia— Arcturus, in the shepherd's horn. 

Uncle Sam — Isn't batting an eye-lash, and keeping close look- 
out, too, on the Big Dipper. Wants his share, I guess, of the 
punch! Ha! Ha! That means, being interpreted, everybody 
works but father, who's only got to provide the breakfast bacon. 

Sambo Hilarious — But she can't drop, she says, a lid for one 
wink, 'cause of all the spooky goings-on out on this here ve- 
randa. . . . 

Uncle Sam — Of our improvised royal residence, eh? It's cer- 
tainly impressive. 

3 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



Sambo Hiulbious — And she ain^t 'special respectful in her 
nomenclature, while she's about it. 

Uncle Sam — Goldy, or Hoopie, or Haha, wont you return, to 
please her, and convey a polite message to our Lady Dolorous 
of Daffadowndilly, our Grande-Dame-sans-merci, as your re- 
spective elders would like to call her? Tell her authoritatively 
from me, sleep, all the sweeter when wooed and won under 
difficulties, and is then the best leauty doctor — ^beats a mani- 
cure for replenishing one's stock of feminine tact, and a pedi- 
cure for shining up the loud and soft brass pedals of one's 
understanding. 

Whooplah- Whoop — We don't want to retire. Dad. 

GoLDiBRASS — Not while such rare high jinks are on the tapis. 

Minnehaha — History and religion sandwiched by vaudeville acts 
beats a razzle dazzle. 

Uncle Sam — ^Can't you be trusted alone with the missive. Sambo ? 

Sambo Hilaeious — Sure Boss, I'll take the missal, but — - — 

Peiscilla — ^If if s a missal some one ought to do the illuminations 

on the margin. 
Sambo Hilaeious — Just what I was about to prevaricate. 
Peiscilla — Intimate! or Asseverate! 

Sambo Hilarious — ^Exactly, Miss. I'll do. Boss, exactly as you 
procrastinate. 

GoLDiBEASS — ^He'U get something effective to its destination. 

Uncle Sam — 'Cross between sky-rocket and gargoyle. And watch 
him pour the whale-oil all over the war-zone waters, trust his 
cautious wooUy pate for that. Now then, seriously, it's time to 
court Morpheus. Here's a new jingle made up on purpose to 
persuade you: Comment on a text of Uncle Benjamin. Never 
heard it before? 

"Early to bed and early to rise 
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"? 
4 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



GoLDiBEASS — Because it works well with a man, are you sure it 

would bring out the best 

Uncle Sam — In a fair lady? Pat objection, and I kaew it was 
coming, so I modernized the same for feminists: — 

Betimes to your rock-ribbed downies 

And pillows crammed with crushed granite, 
Then the fairies will come and the brownies. 
With Puck, who the joker and clown is. 
To tickle your fancy and fan it! 

Set a going a new world tomorrow 

Half minstrel-show and half circus; 
For in Dreamland Banks you can borrow 
By mortgage on worry and sorrow 

New courage to work it, and work us ! 

GOLDIBRASS — Fine, Dad, superfine, but makes a poor lullaby. 

Whooplah- Whoop — Honestly, haven't you given out enough blue 
ribbons for one day at your spookshow? 

Minnehaha — Can't you knock off for an hour or two, and at- 
tend solely to us? 

Uncle Sam— What am I doing but that? Who gets the fun, and 
the education, and the polish? It's for your sakes I'm trying 
to put Uncle Benny in a corner, so he can't blame us for any 
failure in materializing on time a committee of amateur states- 
men and diplomats — nature-geniuses all, and home-raised — to 
represent us adequately. 

Whooplah- Whoop — Is that so awfully difficult? 

Uncle Sam — I should say so. It involves five several philosophic 
operations : 

First: You've got to know me. 

Second : To know me, you've got to catch me and hold me for 
scientific inspection. 

Third : Then you've got, also, to tabulate the possible candi- 
dates statistically: qualifications, pedigrees, etc., predilec- 

5 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



tions and prices, cost to raise and keep straight, and get 
a "hunch" on fate. 

Fourth: Next, ascertain what representation means as a 
pure theory, and political principle. 

Fifth: Last, what's worst of all, diagram it as a conscien- 
tious practice 

For eligible limber — ■ 
Presidential timber! 

So Uncle Benny's solemn injunction at parting was: ^^Study 
history, Sam." And we've done it at a pretty smart rate ! But 
brother Nebby, Sister Ishtar, they only showed us how the old 
world's always ditto, however often and fast you bowled her 
over and over around the invisible orbital ring of the great uni- 
versal stellar circus. And the second gulp-it-quick Chautauqua 
nickleodion course of know-it-all-ogy,- — it merely confirmed me 
in my ingrained political prejudice: — autocracy, theocracy, 
plutocracy — they may have the advantage in get-there-on-the- 
job-never-mar-the-plot efficiency, when the right man's in office 
— ^but they don't provide for a rainy day, nor life-and-accident- 
insure you against a numbskull in the line of succession. Bet- 
ter "the open door to all comers. 

Butchers and plumbers, 
Heroes and hummers." 

and try out all applicants, civil service exams, and water cure for 
the clams, and shams, and campaign slams, and auctioning off 
the public plums to the highest bidder for the honor; and the 
dirty jobs, as is fair, to the lowest. Give me democracy, the lean 
and the fat — the foul and the fair, the miss-it by a mile or hair ; 
and hit the bull's eye pat; — but see, it's duly doctored in any 
event with high finance ! 

Sing ^^flibberty gibberty," 
Life, happiness, liberty — 
To the old tune— "Yankee Doodle" : 

6 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



Who collars the dollars, 
And totes them and votes them, 
He's entitled to the buncombe and the boodle. 

But mind you, just for one short term, and look out for rotation 
of office : a spin or two at the most of the roulette wheel of for- 
tune : and so everybody's happy, busy chinning and chewing hope 
— a la peppermint ! 

A mnemonic; in the ^^nick" of time; Nicodemus — Demos- 
demociacy ! 
Now for the other bit of Uncle Benny's welcome if unsolicited 
advice: "Explore your mind, Sam." I call that downright 
interesting : — 

Dust out the nooks 

And spray the crannies. 
Iron out the kinks 
And putty up the chinks. 
And with pick-axe and hook 

Ascertain, if you can, where the soul of the man is ! 

That's a fine operation when performed on a worthy subject. 
{Uncle Sam assumes a meditative pose, and after a pause 
proceeds) 

My glory is one and various. 

Multifarious, vicarious, 

blessed kaleidoscope ! 
Shake my folk, . . . 

And any crazy assortment makes a masterpiece : 
Heigh ho, freedom and symmetry! 

And my so-called vice. 
My municipal scandals? 
TheVre the winged sandals 

1 don in a trice. 
On which I ascend 

To hobnob with my friend — 
*'The Top of the Morning !" 

7 



UNCLE SAM AN^D HIS 



How could anybody but I extract any sort of government ? How 
else, hoaxing the masses of antagonistic, uninitiated, self-seeking 
stocks of humanity — and interests — give us a possible govern- 
ment? — any one given result — any policy? 

So even my Bosses, you see, are not to be condemned with- 
out a hearing! And lots of allowance for peculiar circum- 
stances and conditions! Hurrah! 

Anyway, you observe, here I am for good and all, unique. 

Not to be duplicated or superseded. 

So you gather, girls, I've come back from our tour-of-the- 
world uncorrupted. Simon-pure American 

And, girls, you may add: I've come back from that Egyp- 
tian hocus-pocus with a great notion that was aMays in the 
back of my head, vague and wonderful : — 

HE was just a pretender ! 
I am the real scion and ancestor in one ! 
I am immortal, 
I can't grow old. 

I'm reborn different ever, yet the same, 
Eeincarnate in every generation. 
' Every new mood's just a new note 
Struck in the great gamut of ME. 

And don't cast reflections on the harmonics and overtones 
And the rumble of stained glass 
To the middle of the fiddle. 
Or the fairy flageolet, 

Or the big tooters in the box of whistles ! 
But I'm no egoist ! 
It's for others I exist 
That need me and don't know it. 
And freed me. 
Decreed me. 

And yet would impede me, 
Pm the poem myself and the poet. 

8 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



And who^ll declare 

Auto-diagnosis 

Isn't fair? 

In homeopathic doses — 

Good for the skin, 

And the liver, 

The teeth, and the spleen, and the hair? 

Now what have any one of you girls to object against iny little say ? 

GoLDiBRASS — I should think you'd have to be strictly quarantined 
against your family, for you wouldn't like it if they got the dis- 
ease as badly. 

Uncle Sam — 'What's that, you saucy chit? Is this the way you 
help me to know myself — diametrically? intrinsically? 

Whooplah- Whoop — I should suggest. Dad, take us for a mirror. 
Aren't we all your proud progeny? And don't we between us 
project and objectify your most secret hankering ? 

Uncle Sam — Oh, of course, that's what children are for — with 
ordinary folk: to give the parents a liberal education in seK- 
knowledge; seeing themselves taken to pieces and put together 
again! But that wouldn't do with me. You'd only make me 
see myself as others see me; not as I AM. 

Jessamine Magnolia — I should say, then. Father, look at your 
historic collection of curios and masterpieces — the accimiulations 
of a long and useful life. 

Uncle Sam — ^Shucks ! Such things are forced on a fellow by the 
accident of the excursion-ticket, the Baedeker routing, the 
fire sale and bargain counter, and your hired adviser and 
agent. They don't express your inmost, unrevealed, deeper-than- 
self-scrutiny Essence and Reality? 

Priscilla — I should point to your poets and prophets. They 
might be duly consulted, Father. 

Uncle Sam — Emerson, or Bret Harte? Poe, or Mark Twain? 
Lanier, or Whitman? Which first? last? and all the time? 
I should like to unearth one of them who dared at his peril to 

9 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



X-Eay me, and photo my Swedenborgian remains ! For all my 
broil and bluster, I'm very cunning, and shy, and blushful, and 
damn-you-if-you-do-it, and damn-you-if -you-don't ! I have re- 
jected all "teachers that a new thing taught, and preachers that 
a true thing prought/' Into the waste-basket I determined 
long ago with all impudent seers, and overseers, and similar 
vermin ! Of course I don't object to highbrow makers of books, 
that invent an excuse for a noble acreage of half -morocco ! 

Minnehaha — ^Well, Dad, you've always been a hero-worshipper! 
Can't you get at yourself that way? 

Uncle Sam — ^Heroes ? Not on your life, child. Of course they're 
sport once in a while. But no joss-house choke full of home- 
made gods for me! Of course I like a merry-go-round at a 
fair for the tots: the whole menagerie jigging to a brass band. 
First a ride on the camel, then on the lion, then on the ostrich, 
and always in the saddle, or riding the head, holding on to the 
ears or horns or beak of the beast ; and always in motion ! But 
such toys, they aren't up to straws for showing you which 
way the wind blows ! Girls, I've got to study my Self 

"Seriously, profoundly, essentially. 
Guided and inspired providentially." 

And if you were around, anyone of you, you might with a little 
make-up and a hired costume fool my parental fondness into 
identifying myself with you! Not until I've settled this one all- 
important, critical-romantic, sovereignly practical question can 
I have rest. And all the world's as much interested in it as my- 
self. So my study isn't really egoistic; it's mystico-altruistic and 
fistic-artistic, so to say. 

Who am I? 

Who in me is ME? 

If I break up on inspection — on spectrum-analysis, or rather 
spectral psycho-analysis — into spooks, which of them, pray, indi- 
cates the cardinal sin? is the core of ME? If I'm multiple, 
composite — what are the ingredients? what's the right propor- 

10 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



tion ? the patented formula of the prescription, which Dr. Provi- 
dence wants administered to his patient — Posterity? 

GoLDiBRAss — Ha, ha, so you're a pill? 

Whooplah- Whoop — A whole drug store ! 

GoLDiBRAss — A case of erosion! 

Jessamine Magnolia — ^An illicit still! 

Minnehaha — ^And a dynamite mill .... 

pRisciLLA — For a Fourth of July explosion! 

Uncle Sam — Indeed, it's hugely preposterous. 

And would make for Gargantuan laughter, 

If Providence really didn't fashion and foster us 

As we are — for some solemn august hereafter ! 

I'm something Tragico-Comic, Lyric-Idyllic, grotesque, 

With Bible on parlor-table, and ledger and 'phone on my desk. 

First I pin-prick my spirit, squirt Brown-Sequard lymph 
in it, 

Thro' the spheres then I cake-walk, in tune with the infinite ! 

Ta, ta, — I'm portentous, — 

And who shall prevent us 

High stepping as a giraffe with pink poke-bonnet over his 
Sunday pompadour? 
Thanks, girls. Shoofly. Much obliged for your two tickets, you 
reverend seniors. And the rest haven't any? So much the 
better! The sooner will I be thrown back for counsel on my 
essential Self. (His daughters retire into the cave. Uncle Sam 
opening the tickets and adjusting his glasses, scrutinizes, and 
soliloquizes) Now let's propose the rival tickets to the people — 
that's me. 

Jessamine Magnolia? Well-known to be romantic, chival- 
rous; adores picturesque war-heroes; strictly monogamous and 
passionate. 

There we have it: George Washington! ''StonewalV Jack- 
son! Robert E. Lee! Whew! How am I going to make my ob- 
jection mildly but effectively articulate? 

11 



UXCLE SAM AND HIS 



''Stonewair'? great strategist — ^proud of him; British, Ger- 
mans, French study him; but got on the wrong side; then, too, 
a tinge of fanaticism and fatalism make a man dangerous. 
Can^t tell what he'll be up to next, and you can't stop him at 
it by fatherly advice. 

Lee? Excellent character, brilliant soldier, virtuous, un- 
selfish, loyal to his State, and a Unionist to boot; but hope- 
lessly old-fashioned preference for the underdog ! And wouldn't 
sell his name as a business advertisement after the surrender. 
Can't have him. As good general and chivalrous gentleman, 
he'd merely duplicate the father of his country. He'd con- 
tribute no special element — except that of being on the side that 
failed; and that argues a hopeless unfitness for my present 
business. 

As for the only George? He was no respecter of persons, or 
parties; he'd overbear congress, and browbeat the nation; 
wouldn't yield to pleas of unpopularity or opposition; and even 
Franklin with all his tact couldn't manage him if they differed. 
Of course he never was the lay-figure his grateful countrymen 
have made out of him ; was real human when you caught him off 
his guard; could roll on the ground with ear-splitting laughter 
at a practical joke; could break loose like a volcano when a 
sharper thought he would fool him at a horse trade; was a fine 
judge of real estate, and had a passion for corner lots and the 
unearned increment; could dance with a lady all night and 
never know he really killed her ; liked to pray all by himself out 
in the snow and sleet like a whole meeting-house afire; but all 
the same, he was too wise, too patient, too proud, too tolerant, 
too great, too undemocratic. Besides, he affected the grand 
style ; had a fancy for coaches, royal levees, wouldn't shake hands 
like a pump-handle, held his head too high; moreover, I never 
liked that name, ''George/' anyhow ! And his body — ^had to lie 
on his own estate. Lady Washington (mark that : widow Martha 
— "Lady" !), she didn't want his remains to be a foundation stone 
for the capitol, the constitution, and the machinery of govern- 

12 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



ment. Women always know a thing or two, and I reckon she 
knew best. 

Can't use your ticket, Jessie, I'm sorry. Whafs more, ifs 
too military for a civilian people. 

Now lefs scrutinize Priscilla's proposition. She's the 
scholar of the family; is thrifty and nifty, if a trifle drifty and 
shifty these days. 

Slier man! Farragut! Grant! Donnerwetter ! William Tecum- 
seh ? I like the march to the sea, old fellow ; but then you were 
a pretender: falsely credited with saying '^ar is hell!" when 
you didn't actually say it, but only prove it was — to the enemy's 
coxmtry. You're fine to see ride on a gilded horse with flying 
mane and tail — proudly prancing over prostrate Georgia's pine- 
bough — a winged lady-angel skimming the landscape ahead and 
shooing the flies away with her palm-branch in front of you; 
and your eye steady on the far horizon-sea beyond anybody's 
reach but yours I You're fine sculpture, I admit, picturesque, 
demonic; but not a very persuasive person. Then, too, the 
grandsons of the Johnnie Eebs have unaccountable prejudices 
against you ! 

Farragut f Oh, well bom in Tennessee? but entered the 
U. S. navy at very early age, which makes up for the acci- 
dental birth? Still, who cares about slow little sleepy 
Mobile? Now if you'd captured Boston, that might have been 
of national interest. Who even recalls the Merrimac or the 
Monitor in these days of submarines — except in the Old Do- 
minion where time's stationary? Of course your love-letter to 
your wife was fine, and makes my heart go pittipat still. A good 
naval leader, I grant you; but a diplomat? I'd rather not risk 
you, when I look you square in the eyes ! 

Grant? his tomb is weU and good enough — fine situation 
if you don't like the architecture; — and his initials were well 
chosen by his parents; and he said: ^^Let us have peace"; and 
he drank the right whiskey, to be sure, — the only sort worth 
having, proved such by licking the other fellow ! At Appomattox 

13 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



he was big-hearted — a trifle too much so, to some folk's taste. 
He wrote good memoirs against time, and died game. But he 
didn't know how to choose, and watch his friends. He let him- 
self be shabbily used. That reconstruction graft grew too rank, 
by half. And the third-term-bug buzzed about a mighty deal too 
realistically. Those things aren't good to think about in the rosy 
dawn. Then that Civil War — now the records are all collected 
and the printing bills over-paid — ^honestly, it looks not much 
nearer to our times (but for the immortal pension lists) than 
Nebuchadnezzar or Khafrah. There's nothing more coming out 
of it tomorrow, and the day after. Can't even make it a safe 
topic for conversation till you can get the heroes of both sides 
into one single hall of fame. But by that time the issue between 
them will be so dead it will have to be resurrected, and trans- 
lated by specialists. 

No, Prissy, sorry, I can't do it ; not even out of fondness for 
the odor of sanctity emitted by the Jonathan Edwards brand 
of brimstone, and the sweet balm of Gilead emanating from the 
Emersonian flowery quagmire, and the Thoreauian brier-roses 
cuddling among the lichen-grey boulders, and the haunting 
shudders of witch-burning and soul-branding St. Nathaniel 
chased up and down my youthful back. 

Too bad, too bad, no election after all. 

What's this I find stuck in my hat-band? Author — Anony- 
mous? One of the most prolific I know. ''Suggestions for a 
national anthem in answer to your advertisement to nromote the 
mutual understanding of Yank and Johnnie Eeb" ? Let's inspect 
the document. 

Noble statesman, take due notice. 

'Tis the unchanging law embedded 
Deep in Nature: North is stalwart, 
South incompetent, hot-headed. 

So, in the North of Old New England 

All are stout and sturdy freemen; 
South, on the rock-ribbed coasts, they're fickle 

Amorous molly-coddle seamen. 

14 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



So, in the North of gay Kentucky 

Men are staid and sober-minded; 
But in the South of slow Ohio 

Shiftless, hot and passion-blinded. 

" 'Way down South'' in North Carolina 

Folks of course are gracious, pliant; 
North, up-state in South Carolina, 

Calm, judicious, self-reliant. 

Change the boundary lines, and presto 

Change the people, — who await your 
Legal action to exhibit 

Divers brands of human nature! 

Wonder who got this off ? Trying to make fun sacrilegiously 
of my sectional prejudices! Must be Goldy. "\\rhat ho, who 
goes there and breaks in upon my sacrosanct meditations ? 

GoLDiBRASS — Why, Dad, they dared me to, so here goes! Fm 
about to act a little charade for your private illumination, from 
which you may derive a lesson incidentally in symbolic botany. 

Uncle Sam — Where are your specimens? 

GoLDiBRAss — Can't you see? My lap's choke full, like Ophelia's. 
But my hair sha'n't float down the Suwanee river, and catch in 
the tit-willows. Now mark. Dad, each particular exhibit as I 
produce it, designate it, characterize it, — and don't fail to ob- 
serve its sad, sad end ! Semper eadem, and E plurihus unum is 
my double motto. But first I sing you the song of the census- 
man to heat the uplift-pot ! ( Goldihrass sings) 

From the tripod, lo, hangs my sooty witch-kettle, 

With my broomstick I stir up the brew. 
And I toss my ingredients, and watch them all settle 

And soak and bubble and stew. 

When, say, for a century the living and dead agree 

On mutual admiration. 
They develop a snobbery fast founded on pedigree — 

For jobbery, and the robbery of the nation. 

15 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



From Washington to Jackson your stock's Anglo-Saxon ; 

But before then and since then your diet, sir ? 
Kind heaven, deliver us ! 'Twas almighty omniverous, 

And you haven't the face to deny it, sir. 

Of course we sling English (slang to ragtime by preference) 

And for business reasons all want to ; 
Bad linguists by statute won't change, — 'with due deference 

To the beauties of Esperanto. 

So the language is a fixture. But in morals and manners, 

In aesthetic and political attitude ? 
There's a change in the canned goods in spite of the canners, 

Tho' the label's the same — out of gratitude ! 

Perhaps you can't thrive on mere truth ; but at any rate 
With a pinch you could season your fiction. 

And promote, with your old, new progenitors to venerate : 
Since additions don't imply contradiction ! 

Expand so your patriotism, and diminish hypocrisy ; 

Get the utmost variety in unity ; 
And trust to the genius of universal democracy. 

And keep open your door : Opportunity ! 

Now, the pot's well heated with doggerel, we'll proceed to the 
thick of the plot. Here's a shamrock, and a splinter of a his- 
toric shillelah, and a chip of the blarney-stone — for Pat from the 
Emerald Isle. And a hare-bell (bonny-blue-bell, he caUs it) — 
and a touch-me-not thistle-down, flying to seed the country 
side, for Andrew — ^not so merry as he might be — and unco' 
canny for a' that ; and for Taffy — why I can't think of any suit- 
able flower ; — say heartsease, or a yellow violet. 

Uncle Sam — Whaf s all your flower-garden, child, going to do in 
the soup? 

GoLDiBRASs — Don't interrupt the cook. Taste her concoction with 
a wooden spoon later, when it develops a scum ! Here's a mar- 
guerite and a plain swamp-flag (they style fleur-de-lys, or de- 

16 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



lirxe, don't they?) for France, and a little cosmetic and per- 
fume smuggled in the latest hat. Here's a cornflower — sky- 
blue — for German Gemiith, and head of purple cabbage guil- 
lotined by Prussian efficiency, and twig of the Christmas spruce. 
Here's a dandelion that will have to do duty for the Norse folk 
and their cousins: flower — color of hair, and saw-teeth of the 
leaf — for the grip they get on the grain of your felled tree of 
knowledge when they're Ibsenish or Strindbergian. Then here's 
a scarlet poppy and a yellow jessamine for Spain, and a pinch 
of manana. And for Portugal ? A grapevine-tendril, and a red- 
pepper will do ! And for Russia ? Why, here's a huge flowering 
leek, and a spray of cedar. For Hungary ? A flycatcher ! For 
Bohemia? A jack-in-the-pulpit ! And for Italy? A laurel- 
leaf, a fig-leaf, a zucca, and a ripe olive. And for Greece? 
The acanthus leaf, a narcissus and a clove of garlic! And for 
the Balkan confederacy ? A particolored dahlia ! Or, if you like 
the details, a larkspur for Latin Roumania ; a snapdragon for the 
Serb, a chickweed for Montenegro, Johnnie-jump-ups for the 
bully Bulgar! Belgium? She's a peony — passee. Holland's a 
cowslip, and a rollypoUy Edam cheese. And the juniper ? Guess 
who it's for. "Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem !" If s for Jacob, the 
supplanter, and his swarming progeny. 

Now can you think of the mess to which we'll treat Esau? 
No vulgar pottage this time! And all are going to be boiled 
down in one liquor, and issue as one live golden-rod, see it? 
Isn't it a sceptre to be proud of ? and a hundred and fifty-seven 
varieties of it at that, all over the land ! 

But hark! There's objection raised to its sovereignty. The 
pollen, some specialists declare, encourages hay fever ! So, to be 
on the safe side, war on the golden-rod ! Exterminate it like the 
Bubonic rat ! And that's an allegory, too. Peruse, sir, now your 
directories and your bluebooks, and your who's-whos, and all 
your social Bibles. Aren't all the contents Simon-pure, true-to- 
type, blue-blooded ancestral style ? 

17 



UNCLE SAM AND HIS 



Did you slap, sir, a tax on 
The pure Anglo-Saxon 

That he hides his top-knot so shyly? 
Up, and sing him my ballad 
Of the census-man's salad; 

With a qnery then honor him highly : — 
"Which? The sunny, or the dewy side 
Would you choose of race-suicide?" 
While you wink at the coroner slyly! 

Ah, what have you been fed on, Dad, seven days of the week the 
year around? And where's the thoroughbred committee to rep- 
resent your Hash, which by any name from Goolash to Chop- 
suey, would taste as fair on your polychrome bill of fare ? And 
this too is (ladling out some of the brew) (see how green it is?) 
the poultice that has been applied to all sores: — race-suicide, 
scarcity in scullery maids and flunkies, shortage in dividends of 
transportation companies, low earnings of employment bureau 
managers, charity experts, and sociological flabbergasters ! 

Now I wish you luck, Dad. Watch the pot. If 11 boil OTer 
sooner or later in spite of the proverb, and too soon, may be! 
But mind it doesn't spatter your fair linen and mar your fine 
white goatee! And don't imagine all this is a nightmare, rele- 
gated to — up yonder on the summit of the canyon-cliffs. If s in 
our little inside, you know — and very particularly squirmy! 

'^Godwot, 
The pot's hot, 
And forget me not," 
Quoth the Hottentot 
To the visionary 
Missionary 
He had got 
Into the pot! 



Good-night. 



18 



POLYGLOT KETTLE 



Uncle Sam — Well Gk)ldie is a rogue, but I don^t dote on this kiiid 
of '^poetry'' that hobnobs so indecently with truth ! 

But what was the spike I was going to drive into the devil's 
coflBn lid, before Uncle Benny comes back from kingdom come 
to quiz me, and probe me, and find if I've made up my mind? 
Ha, yes I Where does reside, in the ultimate analysis — the truth, 
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ? Where ? 



19 



II. 

HIS BRAG SONG AND HIS INCANTATION 



II. 

WiU you sit forever, sway-back in your rock'r at ease, 

Argufying with a prying, or dying old Socrates? 

Will you spoon out a chunk from your ice-cream freezer 

To cool your enthusiasm for Brutus and Caesar? 

Or deep with a Wordsworth to the heart of his lakes peer 

In the hope you may capture the secret of Shakespeare ? 

Or agonize, wondering for a doctrine how could a 

Sane human forsake his young family like Buddha? 

Will you indite a new Bible, and with boredom cram it, 

To procure it authority by the sword — like Mahomet? 

Or manage world-empires relying, sir, wholly on 

Your star, intrigue and publicity — as Napoleon? 

Or if progress of civilization be a hideous misnomer — 

Why, rub up your Greek, and go gunning with Homer ! 

It all seems easy and highly convincing 

While you take it for granted, like the virtue of ginseng ! 

Yet this cult, sir, of genius is choke-full of hypocrisy, 

And worse, a death blow at the soul of democracy. 

Shall you deify less than one man in a million, say ? 

Every dog his day ! If no starts of great brilliancy. 

It doubtless is due to the ubiquitous diffusion 

Of light in our heavens, we've to thank for the illusion 

That insures us self-reliance in alliance with humility. 

Individual initiative, and social stability ! 

For even those deified overadvertised geniuses- 
Imposed on humanity for both noble and mean uses, — 
Who secured them their luminance, and endorsed them with 

authority ? 
If not the people as a whole, then a goodly majority ? 
For, when first but a few gave loyal approbation—- 
They had discerned a practical campaign of education, 
Divining a deep-seated mystical demand, sir. 
For the proffered supply — to their prayer a fit answer. 

23 



UNCLE'S BEAa SONiG 



Bid they divide then the mass, like political promoters 

Into parties so equal of disciplined voters 

That they marshalled a controllable competent margin 

And their victory was hailed, and the new gods writ large in 

The school manuals to create so a classical preference, 

A deepsouled awe, or a civilized deference? 

If s a game myseK have played at not seldom, 

.When IVe hewn at my foes like Agag and f ell'd 'em ! 

And I opine there's an ethical justification for such procedure 

If only so you can save your creed, your 

Sacred flag, your inheritance, your history 

And immortal soul too ! 

Now hearken, a mystery ! 

Every hour is made glorious (or rather every minute is) 
By the birth in our country of a score of divinities; 
But we whittle them down till they're usable, sortable 
To the size, and distinction that are safely supportable. 
Yet so long as we're glutted with food predigested 
And scholarly reasons for our being infested 
By alien traditions that worry and weary us, 
(Trade-reasons, academic, at bottom, not mysterious) 
"We'll experience no original, aboriginal himger, — 
Such as all men rejoiced in when the world was yoimger, — 
For their own, their thitherto unrevealed essence 
In progressive effervescence, and divine rejuvenescence, — 
Which projected is — God, and whose cult is — religion ; 
Which either side hell — ^to rest a high bridge on — 
Erects vast piers generation by generation 
We pass over in triumph to our deification ! 

Such my exultant faith, my exalted self-assurance. 
My folks are unconquerable. Hope and endurance 
Rise perennially equal to courage and genius. 
'And, to Fate's decree a complacent and serene ^^yes" 
Blindfold we utter. For there boils up a geyser, 

24 



AN-D IlSrCANTAT'ION 



And blazes a crater of wisdom wiser 

Than prudent policy, from deeps unconscious. 

From heights beyond knowledge on the ocean we launch us — 

The Unknown ; while our supreme, our spiritual fiat 

Creates for us th' ultimate goal we fly at ! 

But where is the mortal can endure at the helm 

Of our storm- vexed vessel? So lest honor overwhelm 

His reason, and Caesarism somewhere take root in him, 

We prod him, and harrow — let nothing bear fruit in him— - 

With yelping curs surround his station. 

And relieve him soon by pre-established rotation 

Of office. Precluding thereby the trained professional. 

We cheer on our amateurs in endless processional. 

However, in and thro' them 'tis I — ever I — 

The One and the Only — ^make live, or let die; 

With subtle inspiration overrule every blunder: 

Yea, I — the One, I — the Only, I — ^the Ever, 

The contradictory, manifold, mystical and clever ! 

Ah, might I behold in vision at length 

My vitality, my cunning, my wisdom, my strength 

And elicit and extricate from the vulgar and common 

My infinite Self; for my worship summon 

My total variety ! (Uncle Sam cries out in mock seri&as man- 
ner) Appear, thou dreaded 

Thou terrifying, monstrous, thou hydra-headed . . . 

{He stares with amazement when actually nine phantom Uncle 
Sams of identical features appear seated, cross-legged on 
the ground) 

Ha, — who be ye here who mock me and beard me in 

My own hemisphere hitherto all feared me and revered me in? 

{Recovering his composure) 

Might you gentlemen be the sons of Goddess Prosperity? 

Male muses, who, resembling me, challenge posterity 

To declare who is who in our magical circle? 

{Mock mystically) 

25 



UNCLE'S BRAG SONG 



You've heard of the Verteber doubtless (that will work ill 

Ujiless exercised duly with practical austerity), 

"Where secretly resides — pure virtue, and verity — 

Your link of prenatal and posthumous incarnations ? 

The Yerteber, whence for ecstatical vibrations, 

Or prehensile attachment simian or leonine, 

Once th' caudal appendage waved gloriously free, Nine? 

Now whenever this Verteber (anonymous, unornamental), 

Ye press to Mother Earth in posture Oriental 

And ye entwine (to confine in a rotatory circumlocution 

Your animal magnetism for concentric execution) 

Those legs, seven-league-booted, you've never put flesh on — 

You can raise as I've heard an exhilirating spook-session ! 

Is it so you have happened? (Draws deep breath and awaits 

reply) Do I practice ventriloquy 
Unawares, that I raise nine echoes to my soliloquy? 
Your pertinacious reserve may I rouse to contradiction ? 
Are you myth ? Are you legend ? Are you fact, sirs, or fiction ? 
Have at you, dumb fakirs, and spurious yogis, ; 

And let anyone protest who no bluffer and rogue is ! 

For all my incantation, the apparitions persist? 

And insolent silence prevails? i 

I have heard (I believe, on good authority) some time or other, 

that when alone, (mutterseelen allein, as my sweet High 

Dutchman phrases it) 
In certain yet unascertainable states, 
There supervenes a panic, 
A mist suffuses all ; 

And, without knowing how, nor leastwise wiUing to, 
One dissolves the intimate bonds that integrate 
That singular, agglutinative Somewhat 
Selected and concreted thro' years from infancy 
Out of the elements inherent within us. 
Subtly kneaded up with remembered and forgotten 
Reactions to our ever-shifting environment; 

26 



AND INCANTATION 



Together with all spontaneous irresistible 

Whims and moods of the soul — • 

Irrelevant perhaps, and once free to be or not to be, 

But wrought now fatally into the texture of our being — 

These, together, and more — ever so much more maybe — 

Do constitute our established 

Immortal Personality. 

Now, when the bond you can't see. 

Finer than the floating gossamer in a spring morn, 

Spim with filaments of the invisible 

Stronger than adamant. 

Is loosened momentarily — 

With the dissolution of the actual, else inevitable — 

See! 

All the forlorn might-have-beens. 

That survive in our regions infernal. 

Dance in a vaguer-than-graveyard moonshine 

Their awesome saraband; — 

Ay, weirder still, more gruesome. 

The unbegotten maybe's and shallbe's, reserved for future 
existences 

Prenatally appear. 

Demean themselves as in a dream 

Before our astonished eye. 

If lost then in the mazes of our vision. 

We but acquiesce in their gambols, 

Grant them friendly leave, or better, magnanimous en- 
couragement — 

(Entirely at ease as to our essential sanity, 

-Confident we can reassume at will 

Whensoever we list 

Our, ah, so much overestimated selfhood) — 

If we wink then, seeming not to notice. 

If, evasively fixing them unawares. 

We woo them to disport themselves 

And enact their several parts 

27 



UISrCLE'S BRAG SONG 



On the still stage of hallucinatory apparition, 

In a dream whose wayward course 

We no wise desire to determine ; — 

And they do verily reveal their very selves : 

Tender, violent, rapacious, delicate 

Illumined, brutal; — 

Then, then, I have heard 

(And I say "sobeit" with all my being!) 

Out of their frightful, heartrending or soul-melting freedom 

Observed so with impartial, poised. 

Sensitive, sympathetic understanding, — 

(Aloof, yet yearning shyly, mysteriously 

To be involved in the weird spectacle, 

To include them all, absorb them intimately) ; — 

Then, then, perchance 

Innocently, totally without connivance 

Somewhat is wont to insinuate itself, 

!N"estle as a holy stowaway in the hold of our being; 

Some atavistic, or prophetic aspect. 

Some cognate, but half-realized intimation. 

Then, then at last. 

When the phantoms flee, abashed, self-banished. 

Or drawn imperiously of some cosmical necessity 

Into the invisible, the non-existent — 

And the 'Soul insists as aforetime 

•On its egoistic, unrivalled. 

Self-evident allness and sufficiency; — : 

Why, it awakens to its old being. 

But bedewed, hoarfrosted so to say or enaureoled, 

Enhanced in mood, enriched in intuition. 

Wiser, kinder, more alluring. 

Hallowed of a sense of mystery. 

Echo-haunted ever after 

With the unmistakable waft of genius from beyond I 



AND INCANTATION 



Ha, ha ! 
Isn't that so? 
And what now? 

This is the kind of translunary experience 
Vouchsafed to me, the highly favored. 
By your unsolicited 
Obtrusive presences? 
Then, gentlemen, take heart of grace. 
I will not prance, nor paw the air, nor invoke electrocution. 
I merely order up the curtain gaily, 
And cry out, full-chested: 

^'Let the trained animals perform ! Hip-hip, hurrah !'* 
And you can count on me to elect and make my own 
Any eccentric but invaluable aspect 
Of my all 'round extra-personal personality 
You shall succeed in bringing temptingly to'iny notice 
By worthy impersonation ... 
Intended of course in the first place altruistimlly, — 
(With no side glance at box oiOfice returns 
Or publicity, or artistic incense in one's flattered nosladil)'— ■' 
For the enlargement altogether in comprehensive view. 
The deepening in introspection. 
The heightening in aspiration 
(If such thing, gentlemen, may be!) 
Of my hitherto unsuspected but all-sufficient 
Self-knowledge-and-appreciation! 

{All nine phantom Uncle Sams calmly fasten their staring eyes 
on him as if he did not exists and they fixed a hlanh wall be- 
yond him) 

Where's that wall each of you f ocusses 
With such pertinacious inquisitive, far-away gaze? 
Straight through me — ^you penetrate to the abyss? 
Yet you're disposed in a circle about me ? 
Evidently there's no such wall, then, 
Such ultimate cynosure, such abyss. 
Wherefore, as you're all mum, 

29 



FNCLE'S BRAG SONG 



And there's no cat would want your tongues for tidbit, 

I confidently declare: you're non-existent! 

There now ! 

What next? 

When I say to anything: You ain't — it ain't! 

Can you object? 

I deny you, not half-way, but downright and altogether. 

What? You don't even wink when I deign 

To give you specific warning of your peril so? 

I admit, were you audibly worth refuting, 

I might condescend, be graciously induced by you. 

To argue and conclusively prove, convincingly persuade you too. 

That, since I declare you non-existent. 

You're just paradoxical hallucinations. 

Phantoms gendered of phantoms 

In the clogging fogs of hysteria. 

Exhalations from the squalid bogs of introspection — 

And everglades of melancholia ! 

But I prefer to assert my naked authority. 

Do you hear ? 

Either pack. 

Or crack. 

Or explain away your insolent pretence 

To existence and sense ! 

{All nine phantom Uncle Sams most actively and facetiously 
nod and winh at one another; then indulge irritatingly in 
cacchinations, sputters, and abdominal contortions. Thereupon, 
they hrealc into articulate hut confused cries as follows) : 

Ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho! ho! 

How? How? How? 

Isn't he amusing? Our patience abusing! 

Garrulous? querulous? fatuous? preposterous? 

Silly-romantic? bacchantic? frantic? 

In one word — ' 

Delicately absurd ? 

30 



AND INCANTATION 



{Here the voices come to express a common idea, sequently 
rv uttering words that combine together to what follows) 

Unworthy we should waste on him a word! But if we can't 
quite deign to talk to him — we can talk at him — ^by projecting a 
joint delegate — a sort of Theophrastus Bombastus — to the Nth 
power — a central vicarious Voice — ^to do duty for Our noble 
multiple being, and project to this super-Booby — an audible 
expression of our composite group-consciousness — something 
spectral — automatic — irresponsible — whose dignity can't suffer 
— ^rendering us so base a service — as to confer with such an in- 
terlocutor — and put his megalomania to confusion ! 

Whoop it up, whoop — ■ 

Nor doubt nor droop — 

Great Voice of the group — 

Ay, bow thee and stoop — 

To the ear of this monstrous Nincompoop ! 

Uncle Sam — That's the way you propose and purpose to address 
your Uncle Sam ? We'll teach you court manners. 
(Uncle Sam clubs them promiscuously, hut his violent blows 
smite the empty air and recoil, so that he loops and cavorts, to 
the increasing tumultuous hilarity of the assembled Nine. At 
length, the announced hollow Collective Voice spealcs) 

Spectral Voice — Have you exhausted your exquisitely entertain- 
ing fit of wanton assertiveness ? Pray, behave henceforth more 
suavely. 

Uncle Sam — ^Where do you proceed from? Out of the middle 
of nowhere? Might you reside in my hat? {He examines it, 
puts it back on his head) I'll be totally jiggered ! (He feels in 
his trouser pockets) Where am I at? 

Spectral Voice — Don't imagine our wisdom could proceed out of 
secret and sacred recesses of you! Bow yourself before the in- 
evitable^ — since you have compelled our candid asseveration of 
truth and goodness. Eesume your usurper's seat ? imperturb- 
able, unteachable, prima-facie assumption, did you by any mis- 
chance conceive yourself unique ? What a pitiful error ! You with- 

31 



UNCLE'S BRAG SONG 



out rivals ? There are more United States, by-gone and to-come, 
than are provided for in your entire geography. Shocking, eh? 
God made only you — little you — and gave you an ungodly 
monopoly — did He ? — of your singular self ? Most unlikely ! And 
He entitled you to private peculiar access to light and immortal 
life? What a disastrous mistake! The past was dead, was it? 
The contemporary present — outside of and beyond yourself — 
effete, degenerate ? And to question the dogma of your absolute 
solitary self-sufficience is the unforgiveable sin? Nay, worse, 
Use majesU, to be expiated on some perennial DeviFs Island of 
your withering contempt? Treason to your Godship? Pshaw! 
Faugh ! As you are wont to phrase it — ^Poppycock ! 

Moderate, dear braggart, your extravagant pretensions. You 
are but One of ten. And we Nine, a clear majority, are super- 
ior vastly to you; not in numbers only, but in definite attain- 
ments. 

Uncle Sam — -Liars, I can turn any one of you inside out, and 
outside in again, like a darned wornout sock ! 

Specteal Voice — You underestimate our versatility. What any- 
one of us can't do — we can achieve in partnership. For we live 
by co-operative peace. We substantiate the claims one of an- 
other. We are no haunting monotone, not even a rapturous 
melody of succession. We constitute, you see, a new thing 
psychologically, a chord! Had we been struck together (which 
fortunately you couldn't so far contrive to do) — then, pray, where 
would you be ? We are individually and corporately : Discovery, 
Invention, Politics, Salesmanship, Promotion, Progress, Consti- 
tutionality, Emotional Realization, Ideal Contagion, The Soul of 
the Many aspiring to become the total divine whole. 

Now what are you beside all that? You wanted to know 
your infinite variety? Your profundity? Your ubiquity? 

You were in a hurry to tip your hat (so you implied in your 
mixture of excoriating vituperation and self -idolatry) to your 
prospective apotheosis ? 

32 



AND INCANTATION 



At least you were modest in this — ^you viewed it as a near- 
at-hand divine event, and not a competently completed process ! 
Since now you boasted so impotently and evoked us so per- 
emptorily, we deemed you must at least have gotten out that 
pending patent on your contumacious self ; and we agreed to pay 
you a friendly visit, not proposing at all to infringe on your 
unquestionable unique right; and therefore it is we encircled 
you curiously with our simultaneous corruscation. 

For our own sake, on account of our much lamented outer 
resemblance to you, we are sorry you have proved in error, and 
therefore mortal. We have dethroned you and humbled you — ■ 
you, who ought to make a specialty of some really novel ac- 
complishment never seen on land or sea, some vivid virgin auto- 
eugenic originality! We have proved you, beyond dispute, at 
least in your now observable nascent state, only one of many, 
backward and crude; ay, the least reasonable and real tithe 
of the whole you aren't, and can't hope yet to become: so far 
as we can see ! 

This, by the spectral Echo uniting all our inaudible voices, 
our common spokesman, the subtle haunter and mocker, WE, 
duly convened and assembled, have agreed to convey to you on 
behalf of us all, confining ourselves so far to parliamentary 
terms; We, you understand, your unappreciated rivals and 
superiors, Sam. 

And We, with the utmost amenity, protest how no one could 
in any wise foresee that our inquiry into your spiritual status 
would, by your own defect and collapse, degenerate into an 
inquest. 

We intended friendly vivisection, and not this cruel and pre- 
sumably all-but-futile autopsy. 

Uncle Sam {Scratching his head in great perplexity, half-angry 
and half-amused) — ^By my own inmost, persistent, invincible 
Essence and Ubiquity (thanks for that word!) you're dead 
\\Tong, each and all of you. It's primarily a case of mistaken 
identity. You got the wrong corpse by the ear. I can prove 

33 



UNCLE'S BRAa SONG 



an alibi to your smashing but amicable victory! I may be all 
sorts of a "smart aleck" and idiot and bluffer — in public: thafs 
my little way. But in private, you just ought to see me ! Heaven 
preserve your addled brains from scrambling at the premature 
thought of what I then am ! 

And, what's more, you've been powerfully imprudent — that 
you surely have. No one ever twitted me with impunity. I'm 
not behind-hand catching any man's trick-of-the-trade "on-the- 
fly" when sparking from the rotating sandstone ! Any man's got 
a knack or esoteric specialty? I'm fatal as a spiritual baby- 
snatcher, brain-thief, and soul-picker. 

Boys, you're done for. You might as well unpack your out- 
fit for my leisurely inspection. Open your grips, and green-bags. 

I bet you my hat 

My stovepipe, my bunting-trimmed. 

My only stargirt, fuzzy-rimmed, 
OhokefuU of hot air in the gape of its gap, — 

and bedecked see, for the nonce (just my magic!) with violet 
wreaths a la Ophelia, and sunflowers a la Goliath of Gath — I bet 
you that inestimable celestial Treasure — 

I can spot you ! 
And then I've got you. 
Ay, and I'll blot you 
Off the map. 

(Uncle Sam has during the preceding speech taken possession 
of the centre of the ring of phantoms of himself) 
I dare you here and now to contradict me. That is, if you let 
me deal with you one at a time, and psycho-analyse you out of 
your grab-bag into my vestpocket. I'll fetch you, and you'll 
never get yourself restored, except with my fool-friendly con- 
nivance. That's my dare. Only let me deal with you seriatim. 

Spectral Voice — For your sake we will submit to the improper 
conditions you impose; for, in nature, we are to be taken col- 
lectively. 

34 



AND INCANTATION 



Uncle Sam — Ay, ay, a mere blind. But I'U prove you chumps 
one at a time. At least I'U prove I know you so well by heart, 
I don't have to look at you with a glass eye. And mind you, 
I'll venture more than my Hat ! I'll put up my SeK as the stake. 
See here, whoever I can't read rightly — 

Whoever the rest of you 

ShaU think has licked me, 

He shall be me. 

But if any of you've tricked me 
Or I do get the best of you 

I'll beat you all to superfine pulp. 

And swallow you down at one gurgling gulp. 
There, sealed with psychic science. 
Is my exultant defiance ! 

Spectral Voice — ^We agree to be you, or you we ! 



35 



III. 

HIS READING OF HIS NINE DOUBLES 



III. 

(Uncle Sam goes straight to the first one of the ring of fig- 
ures whose masks are all alike; as he progresses in his descrip- 
tion the particular phantom he addresses comes to resemble the 
character which he assigns to it and finally drops the mash) 

Uncle Sam — I'm going to paint your portraits true Holland 
Dutch a la Franz Hals, not delicate and pensive a la Holbein 
or a la Memmling. Get my idea ? Step up, Number One. Jona- 
than Hayseed — ^Devil-may-care might be your patronymic. Back- 
woodsman? Indian killer? In slushy rhetoric, the noble 
pioneer ? Got a mule, a goat, a cur-dog, a woman, and a bunch 
of kids? That's your outfit, plus a cart, an axe, and a dozen 
odd tools ? Fell trees and char the stumps for a clearing ? 'Slap 
together logs with mud-plaster for camp ? Add, may be, a lean- 
to next season, and the third year a front wall with windows 
and door? Woman scratches for the grub, totes water, and 
raises young in dozen lots? You gully-wash the land, with a 
crop or two, and indianize; or sell out, and move on with your 
waxing tribe of progeny, to repeat the operation just beyond the 
fringe, tiU you get landlocked in the mountains by civilization? 
There you starve, opine, reckon, whittle, tote your gun, run a 
still, pick off excisemen, or kill each other when you heave in. 
sight, (leaders of a blooH" feud, or to clear a court-room, maybe,) 
till you're safely extinct — or migrate singly and lose your 
identity in the big town ? 

Haste makes waste. Drink ruined you. You were once, they 
say, a first-rate ancestor. Eaised three presidents out of hand. 
But you're a has-been, old fellow. Fetch out your bandana, or 
your coat sleeve, so you don't let the tears for your defunct self 
trickle down into your own hairy bosom. 

I've got you, eh ? Can't stutter ? Squeak even ? Just squirm ? 

All right. Number One's unmasked, and, therefore, palpably 
annexed. 

39 



HIS BEADING OF 



See, boys, I^m a pretty good occult physiognomist, phre- 
nologist and all-around practising telepath. 

Nine, minus one — is eight? Am I quite right? 
{Uncle Sam confronts his second phantom self) 

Desperately restless when the fever's on you, a kind of hermit 
then, whose unknown God is gold, you — ^you're the composite 
miner-man? Get grubstaked, start off with donkey, yellow dog, 
pick and shovel, and pans. Stick it out in the searing sun up 
and down gulches and canyons nosing about for a prospect — or, 
like a gopher rat, down holes you drill into the live rock? And 
never a voice, a human touch. Talk to yourself, or feel your 
own arm to be dead sure you're still alive and right there where 
you think you are ? 

Struck it rich again and again, but it did you no good. 
You got back to what you call "civilization" — where the devil 
set his red-lights to flaring, and took back all you beat him out 
of by solitude, starvation, thirst, and terrors of soul. Grub- 
staked for the last time, you left your bones bleaching up some 
creek, and God ha' mercy on the dog and the donkey ? 

There was something queer and awful about you. You 
weren't vicious. But when you got yourself equipped for whole- 
sale business, and took to ripping hills, gulches, valleys, and 
went in for choking navigable rivers and bogs with silt — ^you'd 
have washed away my whole continent to the bottom of the sea, 
if I hadn't knocked you out — you, with my almighty balled fist 
of the law. 

When you're associated like prairie dogs up in some God- 
forsaken waste you've laid out for all the world like a giant 
graveyard — in spite of your fierceness and daring, the gin-mill 
gets your wages, and the organized owner works the govern- 
ment, till you run amuck, and I don't blame you if you dynamite 
like a Jack-the-ripper on a whopping scale. That's your last 
state, and lots worse than the first, by no fault of yours. 

It's sad, but soon you'll be just a bygone hearsay to lie about 
in make-believe books. 

40 



HIS NINE DOUBLES 



Have I nailed you fast— Specimen Number Two — in my bug 
collection ? 

Eight, by my reckoning, minus one, leaves seven. 

(Uncle Sam confronts the third, while the former two seem to 
he now his friendly witnesses, showing hy their facial play when 
they enjoy his scoring a point, whereas the others remain still 
totally impassive) 

Anyone who'd look at you hard could tell you're no Vandal, 
Hun, Cossack or Tartar. You're just my old friend the cow- 
puncher, broncho-buster, paint-the-town-red artist and lynch- 
law trapeze-performer! You were a good fellow, straight, and 
free, and fearless, and quiet, till a hornet stung you, and you 
got to roister and act mean. You loved the arid mesas, and the 
wide opaline plains. You hated the tame drove of himians. 
You rode thro' the chapperal like a king, or a demon. You 
were a lightning bolt at rounding up the herd, at heading off 
a stampede. You started out with a grim smile to beard the bliz- 
zard alone, to locate the cattle, and you took big chances just 
to do up your job clean to a finish. You loved to rope, to throw 
and brand. You were a specialist in mavericks. You loved to 
ride down and noose the mustang, break him bareback to your 
will, your life like a bowie-knife between your teeth. You were 
homesick for the lonesome song of the coyote to the moon, the 
bark of the prairie dog, the scream and swoop of the eagle. You 
drank, and you scrapped, and you swore; quick on the trigger, 
not over particular about the neck you wrung. And women? 
they were just another sort of cattle or incredible goddesses — 
couldn't ever quite tell which ! 

Heaven bless you ! The cowcatcher, the barbed-wire fences 
drove you out. You're almost gone, the more's the pity ! Shake, 
old boy, you don't mind, do you, now that I detect, recognize 
and expose you ? 

Seven, I suspect, minus one's just about half-a-dozen. Keep 
tab on my bookkeeping, you staring idiot-idols of Bogus, Alias 
& Co., incorporated to do business as me ! Ha, Ha ! 

41 



HIS READING- OF 



(Uncle Sam addresses himself to the fourth phantom) 

You^re Jack Robinson, get-folks-on the list! Easton Wesfs 
your surname, "Eat 'em alive'' your title ; real hustle-doctor, and 
step-lively artist. Sow wind, to reap orders ! Goods indifferent. 
Can handle any line as well, on an hour's notice! Sandhills, 
waterlots, slickest style in pokers, pianofortes, toothpicks or 
canned carrots; sea-salt for dyspepsia, or charcoal tablets for 
the complexion — or the other way around; Cumberland plateau- 
chestnut-oak-acorn hygienic breakfast-grits, or doublequick 
steam-roller for neat facial massage; any lightning device for 
the total suppression of comfort and the final elimination of 
leisure ! 

Zigzag over the map, and do the towns, as if you were eat- 
ing Queen Anne cherries off the tree. Scalp the rainbow and 
bottle the borealis. Just to divert your customers. Jolly, and 
wine and dine, and bluff and bully, and take 'em to the best show, 
wallop 'em with anecdotes and folk-saws, and pepper them with 
the current events, travelogues, and political tips. 

It's a point of honor with you to worm your way into the 
confidence of a shark, extract the grouch of a jungle man-eater, 
thaw out the bank-account of a polar bear, and unload a new 
brand of brimstone in Hades. You study homo sapiens, and 
shape him up true to his name if he isn't, decorating him on 
graduation with a diploma from your itinerant school of 
experience. 

You're a gay diffuser of progressive discontent, a dispenser 
of ambition. There can't be over-production, for you'd gener- 
ate any required overconsumption between Sundays. Where 
you've been, there's demand; and supply foUows, as laughter 
on the heels of a racy joke. 

Some folks declare you're a nuisance. You hog it in the 
sleepers, at the show, at the taxi-stands; but then ifs you who 
make the hotels sprout thick as toadstools thro' the wilderness, 
with bars and barbers and manicure-maidens, so you're properly 
entitled to the grub that makes the butterfly, spending other 
folks' money for the best good of your fellow-men. You're my 

42 



HIS ISTINE DOUBLES 



up-to-date empire builder, and therefore I\e got a kind word 
for you, tho^ you're disfranchised somehow, like the army man — 
or the convict. 

Other folks say you're just vulgar, sordid, flippant, and light 
of love. But you're friendly, would do a kindness to a dead- 
beat, and fetch your mother-in-law the last life-preserver. You 
can't afford, perhaps, to be super-elegant or squeamish as long 
as folks are just folks. You love your family in your own way 
at long distance, more than most people do theirs at close range ; 
and you whoop it up in your own shy soul with some sort of fake 
— old or new, doesn't make any great difference to you, so it 
keeps you in hard times from losing your nerve, or your death- 
grip — on human nature. You fear only one horror this side 
damnation, and that's a long vacation; for you don't want to 
expire prematurely of boredom, and cheat the poor dear insur- 
ance companies. 

Say, don't die till you've got the whole country neatly curry- 
combed, for you do keep my ideas in circulation, and are the 
touchstone of democracy. 

{Uncle 8am grins, and the '^'drummer" returns the salute as 
Uncle Sam proceeds to the fifth phantom) 

I know you by names as many as the weeds in Uncle 
Jephtha's corn patch. I'll call you though for short Elijah 
Daniel Eaise-Hell Pax-Vobiscum, importer of cast-off ideas and 
exporter of tall-talk! Soapbox, barbecue-stump, collapsible 
lyceum platform, old-fashioned pulpit, ofl&cial rostrum — all's in- 
different — ^mere local color, with lay-out, setting, and get-up to 
mat^ho For it's always the same joyful, hocus-pocus flimflam- 
mer, honest as a weathervane, steadfast in a veering wind, 
straightforward and unblushing as a phonograph! Democracy 
finds all along its articulate collective voice in you ! 

Some folks say you're a contemptible liar and hypocrite. 
The truth is you were wound up tight before Adam's time, and 
have got to go off. So you gurgle like a sucking dove and coo 
like a camel, and yodle like a cuckaloo, and snort like a bull- 

43 



HIS READINa OF 



buffalo, and trumpet like an elephant, grunt like a hippo, and 
sob like a tapir, and simper like a goggle-eyed sea-lion, and 
squeal like a walrus, and chew straw like a rhino, and snort and 
cavort like the Old Man of the Rockies when the forked light- 
ning touches him on the topknot. You mew and you spit, and 
toot and caterwaul like a covey of wild cats at a caucus. Then 
for a change, you shiver like an aspen in June moonlight, 
dimple like a spring veiled with maidenhair, joggle like a whole 
line of linen in a gale; ere you dive like a wounded whale into 
your icewater pitcher to emerge thence revived like a long-sup- 
pressed cloudburst. Now you groan like a live-oak, cork-screw- 
ing and grinding to snuff in a cyclone, and let drive a Jovian 
stemutration, to shake terra firma, so that judgment's on for the 
remnant, and a Labor Day excursion back to earth for the dead 
and damned ! 

you can do it in several keys and styles : theological, politi- 
cal, cultural, philanthropical, economic, gastronomic, millennial 
or social-rescue. It doesn't matter much to you, or anybody — 
so you're the pyrotechnic waterspout, and hail ostrich eggs 
hard-boiled, and spangle the midnight with a dandelion-and- 
dahlia-pattern, and suffuse the auditorium with alternately 
pulsing red and blue lights, with violet shimmers thrown in for 
afterglow; so — ^you get up an overhead collision between a 
monocled comet and a loose-jointed meteor; so — ^you spray the 
social spirit with bug poison, and launch a squadron of super- 
dreadnoughts on our sainted mother's tears; so — ^you coin me 
into catchwords and saw me up into platform planks; so — ^you 
jack up Solomon's temple and put goldbrick foundations under ; 
so — ^you pull to pieces the throne of the Almighty, and dovetail 
and peg and rivet it together with up-to-date claptrap, and 
shellac it over fresh with made-to-order slang. 

You're useful. You sweat the criminal boredom out of a 
tired people. They stamp, they howl, get converted and have 
the D.T.^s without those deleterious after effects. When they 
lapse from grace the day after, and return to sober sense and 
the savings banks, they spontaneously agree to let the profes- 

44 



HIS NINE DOUBLES 



fiionals run the government for their own benefit (business be- 
ing business), and to let the church hobble along as before for 
the climbers, the snobs, the jejune goody-goodies — and the im- 
mune to thought. 

Oh, popular education is slow ! But how else would your 
job pay, making it so interesting and wholesome, like a cross 
between a cock fight and a sarsaparilla sundae? 

(Uncle Sam turns to the next, leaving the orator to swell like a 
pouter pigeon) 

You^re my blithesome perpetual-motionist, and as much bet- 
ter than your predecessor as action's an improvement on words. 

Action! action! 

Disinterested addiction. 

To faction 

And friction ! 

Expulsion, 

Convulsion, 

Suction 

And ruction, 

my wonderful human dynamo! 

Keep, keep folks busy. 

Dance them all dizzy. 

And pledge 'em to temperance while you dine 'em and 
wine 'em 1 

You jolt, heave up and juggle till your soul's in joyful jeop- 
ardy ; till the atmosphere glitters and tingles with your self -gen- 
erating ozone, everybody's bath-tub's full of electric eels, and 
life's one unmitigated fricassee of delight! 

What can't and don't you do? Boom Job's ash heap into a 
first-class residence town? lick Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards in* 
differently, anything that's fierce and not too dangerous on the 
horizon line? mix up the oceans, which is highly immoral? and 
kick around the banking system, just for healthy exercise ? 

You're for everything nobody wants, till you make them like 
it in spite of them. You're against everything you don't do, or 

45 



HIS READING OF 



do do when others dare to do it, till everybody swears nobody 
ever did it, or thought of it. 

You're Elijah cornering the priests of Baal — ^telescoped with 
Samson working the jawbone of an ass. You damn Ananias up 
and down, and elope with Sapphira overnight on the sly. If s 
entertaining. Never a dull hour, and serious knowledge and 
technical business somehow get whizzed through between whacks 
of your hickory slap-stick. 

Ho for a club, a club, with knobs of molten brass-buttons, 
and spikes of gun-metal! And the country prospers, and the 
devil is there to take the next fellow — ^unless he benefits remotely 
by your preservation of national resources 1 

What could I do without you? 

You're my man of all work, my Jack of all trades, and master 
of more! Issues? Why you pick 'em off any prickly pear and 
persimmon tree. Tariffs of iniquity? infamously violated states 
rights? Recall of wives? referendum for sun spots and un- 
scrupulous eclipses? annexation of the moons to Jupiter? ex- 
pansion of the belt of Saturn? extension of improved roads to 
Venus, when she's evening star? and making hell-for-sartin 
those mythical canals in Mars ? 

You excoriate, you corrugate, you copperline our inside 
against the day we've got to gulp down the whole bristling solar 
system, and parts adjacent. You scorch the atmosphere five 
miles up. You emit million-mile-long shoots and streamers 
from your private photosphere. You sputter spooks from your 
spiritistic sparking plugs. You stick your little finger into the 
teething mouth of infant industries, and everybody's prepared to 
die, and cheerfully at that, having beheld the ultimate atomic 
conglomeration, and heard the dernier cri in the music of the 
spheres ! 

(The sixth phantom winks at Uncle Sam, who chuckles good- 
naturedly then looks long and quizzically at the seventh) 

Don't get alarmed. I sha'n't give it up yet. I admit this 
seventh — this Babylonian day-of-rest — is harder to unriddle than 
the rest of you common, weekday good fellows. 

46 



HIS NINE DOUBLES 



Ha, that sets me on the trail. 

Hammurabi? Wasn^t there such a swashbuckler got tables 
of handy directions from his God? Then Moses plagiarized? 
or maybe filched from Hindu Manu, from the Persian Avesta, 
and cornered all the composite credit without so much as a thank 
you ma^am ? You used to run the shop, but you don't quite now. 
You sneak your name into an anonymous firm, and set up your 
shingle in a sanctimi. Don't need to fake omniscience these days. 
Chaps ''as knows law" come too cheap. But for form's sake, you 
still keep precedents in pickle behind scary sheep-skin backs. 

Who ever calculated your orbit? Now you shoot out on a 
parabola, and you angle in the interstellar void; then you crook 
and coil and backslide and loop-the-loop, so Eve's steady 
couldn't track your trail, and ever untie his own bowknots in a 
coon's age. 

You're sedate, and solemn, and massage your raison d'etre 
with dog-latin. But watch you through closed doors tickle your 
tout-ensemble with a technicality as feathery as the foot of a 
gnat! And you're not without adventurous spirit. Just to see 
you tilt and drive at all the bubbles of progress with a legal 
point, mounted on a British Magna Charta quarter-staff! And 
you're courageous — with other people's interests when your pro- 
fessional afflatus blows you away. Not much of a case, and a 
favorable decision might cost your client his bottom dollar — ^but 
by Saint Jehoshaphat — ^what a beautiful bit of litigation ! 

When you legislate, you're practical. You see to it life 
doesn't lose interest by serious interference with big crooks, blue 
bottles and yellow jackets, but the bonny buzzy flies you all glue 
fast in the tanglefoot. If you make a mistake, well, what you do, 
I guess you can undo for a consideration, or work out a reason- 
able construction, and there's joy among Carlyle's captains of 
industry and the magnates of the yacht club ! By fat fees and 
ingenious delays you promote peace among the rich, and culti- 
vate a spirit of resignation in the deserving poor. When you 
contemplate an unprincipled newborn social babe, you adminis- 
ter first aid to the injured in a trice, and swaddle up his inno- 

47 



HIS EEADINO OF 



cent limbs with rubber that won't give. When there's a head of 
common sense looming up on the horizon, you exhume and fur- 
bish up a dead-letter, and level it, and aim and let drive; and 
the horizon is warranted safe-and-sane again for a decade or two. 

You know you pretend to be Roman and British, to date 
back to Justinian and so forth, but I fancy nothing of the sort is 
the case. You're just my old New England conscience, trans- 
lated out of the vulgar tongue ; or maybe you're my down-south 
love of sport, sworn to make my fighting instinct acquire craft 
and cunning, and justify my combativeness with imputed prin- 
ciple and well-bred indirection. 

You know I'm going to sidetrack you, till you quit trying to 
run my freight trains up a heavy grade by turning off the steam 
and fixing the airbrakes ? 

(Uncle Sam leaves the seventh much disconcerted^ and a hit 
angry, and envisages the eighth) 

Ha, ha, I can see you think you're an extra big bug, but the 
chameleon isn't a circumstance to you. You can swap bones to 
suit conditions, as well as hide. When you're whitewashed and 
gilt-edged I can't abide you. When you're brutal and a gaUant 
bugaboo, and make good muckraking Sunday-supplement mate- 
rial, you're cute in your peculiar way. If you know how to buy 
respectability with continental junkets, pious endowments and 
lifetime monuments to your memory, you can even induce the 
guileless pew to remember you in prayer should you contract an 
abrasion ! 

When you're a big-bellied tiger-eye in your spider-web, every 
thread spun out of yourself, and made fast in a snarl of human 
interest; a plumed chief with your feudal clans oath-bound to 
die for you and the swag, and your underground system of cata- 
combs handy, where you make vice profitable only to the mid- 
dle-men, and discouraging to the victim, why, you're sinister but 
not altogether devilish. When you tax the rich for rotten public 
improvements, and throttle business that won't kotow to you — 
as the self-appointed representative of the vridely distributed 

48 



HIS NINE DOUBLES 



"plain people'^ — ^you promote economic equilibrium, and are a 
political educator of the well-to-do. 

When you play the upstart robber-baron and hog coal mines, 
virgin forest, water-rights, railroads, to squeeze the country like 
a lemon and call it development, you^re a menace, but you're easy 
to suppress; and maybe you are a trustee for Plato's republic 
while you think yourself a monstrous grand-mogul. 

When you manipulate values, and magnetize the people's 
precious savings against a rainy day into your private vaults, on 
an excursion ticket of which the return trip expires before it gets 
there — ^then you're a vulgar, sleight-of-hand professor, and need 
stripes badly to advertise your talent at par. 

Of course you do it to save the rest of us from mammon, but 
we'd rather dispose of our filthy lucre for our personal comfort 
than procure you a deserved corner ia damnation. 

But the time I loathe you is when you play public benefactor 
and saviour of society, when you work up a panic and then hurry 
your first aid to the injured, buying up everything cheap with 
the people's borrowed spare cash for your own greater gain, and 
then boost prices and sell out to the survivors, and are hailed 
as a booming patriot ! Or when you get behind bars (propheti- 
cally?) and induce honest enterprises to realize on the credit of 
posterity — just as long as you can sell securities — ^you honest 
soul, and guarantor of the proletariat's prosperity; and when 
you can't sell — to Hell with the puppets that danced on your 
wires, and you retire to found a feudal family ! 

I must admit to watch you scratch in your own junkpile and 
dig up a crest and a coat-of-arms ; to see you erect a pompous 
lookout on the daily auto-congestion ; to watch you travel, dena- 
ture, annex a title, and naturalize abroad — ^that's gruelling fun. 

When you stay at home tho', self-sacrificingly, and see your 
name posted everywhere as a benefactor, and reform us till 
we're proud of our gullibility and our meekness under expert 
management; when you rig us out a national business adminis- 
tration, create country-wide sentiment under your sacred and 
far-sighted direction of the organs of public opinion, open new 

49 



HIS EEADINO OF 



fields to exploitation out of political sympathy, finance a profit- 
able little war or two to recruit our stock of heroes, and collect 
incidentally on the foreign investments you induced us to risk? 
Oh — ^you may be a bad-tasting antidote to save us from the easy- 
going optimism that's undermining our constitution ! 

But, do you know tho', there are times when you look big, 
and I feel I\e got to let you grow bigger, so we may have the 
biggest pumpkin in the village show; and there are other times 
(look out, they might come to stay !) when I want to clean house 
and swat the tarantula with my broom; when I dream of first hir- 
ing you to smoke yourself out, and then of deodorizing you as 
bone dust after mutual exposure and wholesale electrocution. For 
then you take a base advantage of our generous faith in human 
nature, our boyish hero-worship, our good-natured acknowledg- 
ment of things, that's disgustingly shabby and low. 

(Uncle Sam leaves the eighth almost shocked, and childishly 
dejected, hut holes hack once more) 

Old man, take timely warning. I'd hate to have a lynching 
in the immediate family. (With restored good humor) 

Now, for the last — ^but not least. A whopper, and only just 
hatched. What a heaven-sent relief ! You make goodness as dan- 
gerous and full of thrills as a career of crime. War, famine, 
plagues — ^they're your opportunities. You're either rich, or you 
hold a mighty affluent thought by the shirt-tail — and you scheme 
out the network of benevolent canals, and operate the sluices 
for a graduated flow. 

Say, your features are a wee bit feminine? Your wrinkles 
of care and human sorrow, your hollow eyes with the searchlight 
stare, and the shine of withheld tears — ^they're mere make-up, 
aren't they ? And your dainty goatee is glued on ? 

Soon you'll have girdled the earth with wanton welfare work, 
and you can defy any wretch to escape. You'll glory in the slum 
when it's piped with hair-tonic, hygienic complexion-wash and 
vegetable milk. Automatic sprays operated for compulsory dis- 
infection in every hole in the wall! Pneumatic tubes distrib- 

60 



HIS NINE DOUBLES 



uting glass eyes and false teeth I Double-jointed cork legs, 
better than nature's back numbers, supplied to aU comers, and 
twilight sleep amputation thrown in free. 

Thanks to you, punishment for crime will become a much 
appreciated privilege, so the hypocrite will die out, and reform 
turn into a new-fangled sport — so perilous and unnecessary! 
You'll eliminate the incompetents by the three-generation sys- 
tem of supervised eugenics, and then get the bankrupt coffin trust 
to turn out sanitary candy-boxes, cradles, go-carts and rattles for 
the superannuated ! 

Meanwhile you'll found research bureaus — and work all the 
bacilli thro' hitherto inconceivable developments, so you can run 
the whole gamut of disease, until self-preservation becomes for 
mankind a fine art, with an exquisite technique so complicated 
we'll have no leisure at all to live or to die. 

When you've run out of physical problems (gutter-cats, mangy 
dogs and spavined horses being eliminated) you'll turn your at- 
tention with your corps of transmogrified doctors and redeemed 
nurses to tackle with scaling ladders the corporate public souL 

All unreformed parsons will be chloroformed, and moderate 
health shall be made inevitable. No apathy or boredom, antip- 
athy for the ugly, no degrading domestic partiality; instead, a 
universally diffused bland idiocy ! No dangerous sense of humor 
shall be permitted to survive. Instead, a solemn consciousness 
of eternal and infinite obligation to make everyone think as 
you do! Vulgar delight in brute strength and unmitigated 
natural bumptiousness will be altered into a perpetual hankering 
after a better world, where there shall be an adequate supply of 
unfortunates for each and all to benefit ! Meanwhile, every day 
his nostrum, and as in the past so in the future 1 

It was once emancipation for niggers only ! It was once tem- 
perance for the down-and-outs. It will soon be aesthetic danc- 
ing for the domestic hog, free eau-de-cologne and automatic tin 
mice for old maids' cats ! 

51 



END OP SECTION THREE 



It shall be plum-piiddiiig with grapeshot for raisins to pro- 
mote mastication in the church militant! Easeful peonies en- 
forced as buttonholes by law to distinguish bachelors in public, 
for the convenience of the summer resort promoter and the idiot 
asylum recruiter. 

Joy to you, and keep your benevolent soul on the dead jump, 
and don't give over ere the whole world's spick-and-span, like 
an aluminum chafing-dish to cook tipsy old Sol's universal Welsh 
rarebit I 



513 



IV. 

HIS SHADOW AND HIS THREE YET IXMSIBLE 
PHANTOM SEL\1ES 



IV. 



Kjiowledge is power, isn't it? 

Now that I have mind-read you, will you surrender? I'll 
spare you all if you but confess my prowess and obey. 

(The nine phantom Uncle Sams unmask, each with his several 
expression and hody-huild, look at one another, suggesting that 
every other be spokesman. At last the '^ Philanthropist** reluct^ 
antly accepts the imposed duty) 

Ninth Uncle Sam — ^We don't think you've quite demonstrated 
your vaunted superiority, Sam. You still cast a shadow, your- 
self, for all your knowledge of us, which you can't fail to admit 
is discreditable for a spiritual being. Yes, a shadow and one even 
you can't fail to perceive. 

Uncle Sam — ^Like the groimd hog, eh? So another spell of 
winter's due? What? That poor thing, you mean? My 
shadow? Never noticed it before. That's so. 
{After a moments hesitation, as if he had a sudden new idea. 
Uncle Sam arranges a loutonniere, which he gets out of his 
hat, in his coat lapel, moves about, assumes several aesthetic 
poses, and bows to his shadow, which is cast by the bonfire under 
the melting-pot) 

The thing persists and capers about and apes me right along. 
(Addressing the shadow) What do you think you are? 
(All the nine phantom Uncle Sams, who laughed freely at Uncle 
Sam's paces and jig steps and affected poses when endeavoring to 
escape his shadow, become most serious, and intensely interested, 
not to say a trifle alarmed) 

Uncle Sam — I know you, pshaw! You're just trying to be. 
You've had a deucedly hard time keeping up the bluff. You're 
my forlorn art-sense ! You're my pale, pouting poesy, you're my 
daintily purposeful delight in the ineffable ! 

(Uncle Sam strikes a suitable attitude, and apostrophizes the 
flickering shadow he now casts directly against the rock wall) 

55 



UNCLE SAM^S SHADOW 



When I look at you, I ache in every bone; it's all so tooth- 
somely ordinary, so quaintly sad. Ifs the old swimming-hole, 
blue-jeans, rail-splitting, that draw tears, done in oils, or dialect. 
Now ifs an ode to Influenza, the empty chair at the opera, or 
"Peace, perfect peace" in the chicken-coop. Ifs the mountains 
of the moon looking cheerily cheesy. Ifs any sort of syrupy 
sobstuff or uplift gargle. 

Thafs one style of you! 

Then another, see? Jags to jocose or jejune Jeremiah 
jingles! Or, maybe, you explore awful jaws creepily between 
tusks of crunching stalagmites and stalactites over a retractile 
tongue, like an octopus tentacle, right into the maw of Never- 
more; and you wake up insane and dote on a thimibscrew, and 
sing litanies beholding the skeleton in the closet of your ante- 
diluvian lady-love ! And aU because, over here, life's too cheaply 
prosperous and lacks the proper excitement of political perse- 
cution ! 

Now for another phase of you! you "cousin" the cloud and 
^'beehive-hole" the sun, and lilt of little green leaves, and lick up 
the maudlin honey-clover voluptuously— and you melt into a 
mawkish sop of sweetness, to serve quick in a minute, colonial 
pewter, germ-free saucer for the doll-babies. 

And still another pose of you, my shadow! You spit raw 
hunks of polar-bear, or hippopotamus-steak at a national bar- 
becue, and celebrate and sing and singe yourself by the sizzling 
fire of love-of -country, tiU the continent has hydrophobia; then 
you auction off your criminal proclivities without a blush — and 
Hegelianize the Declaration of Independence, and apostrophize 
the metropolitan city-directory! 

You haven't struck your gait yet, or you'd materialize, and 
not just shadow me. Ifs all right to have your ear to the 
ground, but the buffaloes aren't coming, nor the iron horse, but 
something that's neither on feet nor wheels nor sled-runners. 
Sniff the zenith ! Ifs no angels, nor aeroplanes ! Listen ! Ifs 
no Singer machine. Can't you guess ? You've got to satisfy the 

56 



AND PHAllsTTOM SELVES 



insatiate ME with the divine, and when yon do it you won't 
make any "^^est sellers^' and get ''spotlight' and free advertising. 
Fll chastise hiTn I love, and prove him so, the price of post- 
humous acceptance — as ME ! ! ! 

{Tlie shadow rises from the ground, becomes enormous, a palpi- 
tant golden haze enveloping all the scene, then shrinks to the 
outlines of Uncle Sam hut covers him with a living shimmer of 
radiancy. The nine unmasked phantoms are terrified, and 
promptly ''freeze" hack to their former stolid, strange, hostile 
uniform-visaged appearance. Uncle Sam hursts into boyish 
delight) 

Hnirah! Now I've got a lightning-bng glow aU over, an 
astral phosphorescence. Who'd have thought there was snch lots 
in my much despised shadow? Eh? You never thought it, you 
nine male muses of mine? (Uncle Sam looks sidelong at them 
for sympathy, and is dumbfounded on perceiving that they have 
quietly reverted to their previous impassive and hostile state) 

Ukcle Sam — ^What? All I've done so elaborately to conquer each 
of you singly is undone in a twinkle ? Thaf s not fair play. 

I know you through and through, and by right of knowledge 
I can incorporate you, or cast you into outer darkness. Thanks 
to you, I've made shift to enjoy life — by shifts. 

Specteal Voice — Though you deem we are so exceeding well- 
known to you, and you reckon yourself (particularly since you've 
got yourself illuminated), so superior, what are you more than 
a phantasmal sum total? An abstraction pretentiously person- 
ated ? While we are luscious, concrete. Each of us has his own 
centre of reality and interest in himself. Taken aU together, are 
we not all there is of you? And we know each other, and com- 
bine to a unity that preserves distinctness of the parts; so our 
self-knowledge is nine-fold; while you, you have made your di- 
visions unreal, mere imaginary lines on the map, and are central- 
ized, featureless. You tyrannize over your own substance. You 
melt yourself up, and then cool off in a haphazard, shapeless 

57 



UNCLE SAM'iS SHADOW 



lump. So we are entitled, even if you identify us individually, 
to defy you as One incomprehensible Social Whole. 

(Uncle Sam hangs his head somewhat abashed; then with no 
hluff, and more radiant than ever, and his eyes shining benevo- 
lently, he admits) 

Uncle Sam — There's some truth in what you say — ^more than I 
like to admit to myself. But tho' you've got my limitations pat, 
you have missed my creative centre. All things counted and dis- 
counted, there's a deal more of me than you Nine — ^not reckoning 
my shadow that I've gobbled down to my greater glory. (Dream- 
ily, melting with a peculiar tenderness) 

Did you ever envisage my golden-rule fool-idealist, my poet 
laureate of vidgar reality? My variety-in-unity maniac? 
Prophet of the golden age of direct self-government? If the 
people's rule is bad, so much the better, saith he, for it will work 
out to a higher civilization ! Multiply checks and counterchecks, 
and aflSrm the right Source of authority, even at the risk of 
political paralysis ! Belief in the people, the whole people, and 
nothing but the people. He sings of Columbus and Lincoln. 
He wrote the immortal Declaration and projected the Constitu- 
tion. He's none of you and yet he IS in my heart! 

And Where's my other idealist who dreams a greater people 
and race? Every refugee's welcome, every outraged dreamer 
and rebel, every political criminal and social outcast, every runa- 
way from exploitation and robbery! Every race-talent, every 
tradition, every hitherto undeveloped latent genius! and aU, 
together, to give us some day the people fit for our political and 
social Heaven of freedom ! No stock's to monopolize, no instru- 
ment in the orchestra is to fail of his part — even if if s a rhyth- 
mic pause. Every little boy, begotten and bom of polyglot 
forebears, who knows but it's he starts the ultimate Breed, pal- 
pitant with the oversoul, to justify philharmonicaUy aU the 
blunders, vulgarity, graft, swagger and silliness that's gone 
before ? 

Where's this Idealist? Not in you. He's in my head! 

58 



AND PHANTOM SELVES 



And there's a third, the actuating mystery, the transfignriiig 
and creative spirit. He's our One Whither — for onr manifold 
whences we can't adumbrate. He represents all that has been 
and is to be — simultaneously in a present we can't yet project. 
When he comes, he couldn't prescribe clerk morals for genius, 
nor ladylike manners for the militant soul. He won't offer a 
rubber ring for young America to teethe with. Not he ! 

Perhaps, who knows, he peeped at us in individual disguise 
at the very start, and took a hand in things — an exceptional per- 
son — a glorious freak — the Father of his country? 

Be that as it may, he's the God you can hope to reproduce as 
you worship. He's in the yolk of every American egg. And 
every man of all my folk has some kinship with him. Every 
vice contributes to his greater virtue, and every vulgarity is as- 
similated, and transfigured to some new refinement, delicacy and 
nobility in him. When he finally appears — ^we are. When we 
adore him, we transmute, and become adorable; and the whole 
world's just the quivering halo of our special Incarnate God! 

And where is He now? Who of you has even ventured to 
dream of himf You don't believe in him? Ha, thafs where 
we differ. He's in my spirit and lives already so, though neither 
my heart nor my mind can adequately realize him. 

So — ^there now, you nine claimants of my heritage, with all 
your merits, what a whopping lot is lacking to you ! My three 
supremes aren't prepared to manifest yet in some rough-and- 
ready, larger-than-life, typical spook — like you Nine. And I am 
the common, integrating, immanent factor. 

I'm the tie that binds — you to them, and them to yon. 

'And I hear the Great God coming. 

Asia has had many chances. 

Europe's lost several. 

America ? Oh, America ? Why, her past is yet to come. And 
I am it. That past is me, you hear? So ifs self-evident I'm 
her only Present and Future too ! 

Now, my bullies, my bubbles, my buzzards, why don't you ad- 
journ sine die — to where you belong? 

5^ 



UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 



(The nine Uncle Sams, each in his own person, nods and says) 
The Nine — We have decided to stay with you. 
Uncle Sam — Eh? You know when you have a good thing? But 

some of you are dodos and mastodons ! 
The Nine — No ghost is too ancient to haunt you, and none 

too recent. 
Uncle Sam — You're vampires ? I knew it ! 
The Nine — ^We're ghosts of the living; at least we hope bo. 
Uncle Sam — And who's really alive but me? So you pretend to 

be me ? illicit extrusions of my substance ? 
The Nine — ^We are you — and you are — I, as each one says it, 

and means it. 
Uncle Sam — Pack off to the void, the abyss, the outer darkness. 

I can dispense with you all stupendously well. 
The Nine — (We know better. You couldn't do without us; 

so we prefer to disobey rather than fail you. 
Uncle Sam — That's very considerate. But I take it upon myself 

herewith to disband, dissipate, and exorcise you — at least pro 

tern. Isn't that clear? I want to be alone! Beat it, till you 

boot the skyline and kick the nadir into a cocked hat. 
The Nine — ^We cling to you loyally in spite of your hasty temper. 

Uncle Sam — Ha, so? I can't shake you ? Can't fold you up and 
flutter you off like dead leaves in the wind ? 
(Uncle Sam fixes each one searchingly — and grows blandly 
amazed) 

Uncle Sam — ^Well, Sam, when you can't manage a thing here and 
now, you adjourn to the antipodes, and into the middle of next 
week, to inaugurate another policy. 

Perhaps, gentlemen, you're bound by a quizzical, metaphysi- 
cal umbilical cord to the Great Mother ? 

I see. Of course you blush assent. I won't insist on fur- 
ther embarrassing inquiry. Since I can't shake you, or sheer you 
off from my quintessence, I'll just hospitably take you in. You 
understand? Into my inmost intimacy, I mean, where you'll 

60 



AND PHANTOM SELVES 



do no harm at all — ^just constitute a holiday-temperance jag for 
your ethereal imperial uncle ! 

So now, a toast is in order to the blessed thirteen of us. 
"Where's my loving cup ? Ha, my hat will have to do. As for the 
liquor ? Who needs any these days. Ozone — sparkling and pop- 
ping the corks of your ideas ! Dry toasts are the most hilarious, 
if psychologically flavored and stirred with a stick of the occult. 

So, ho, my pioneer, my cowpuncher, prospector and gopher 
rat, my boost-and-boom peddler on an inter-ocean toot, my 
hot-air respirator and boredom extirpator, my belly-buster and 
man on horseback, my Puritan conscience transmogrified, 
my graft-expert and life-extractor, my social-surplus saviour — 
you Nine; and myself (who claim I am you all), and my poet 
shadow in particular, who merged with me so happily; and for 
full measure the three you never beheld — my people-glorifier, 
my Eugene in the genitive case, and last of all my final type and 
deity, who are implicit in me, of whom the ages hitherto were 
not worthy ; all of us, you see, and all of us you don't see, taken 
together a la alligator! For who knows what there would be, 
if the thirteen were one, got integrated, and so entirely too 
great — even to smite the spheres ? 

Thirteen? You recoil? There's something iu superstition? 
One too few, or too many ? You'd like my shadow back, to make 
it fourteen? He's where he does most good — inside of me — 
and what's more, thoroughly fused and identified by this. 
{Uncle Sam making a speaking tube out of both fists and talk- 
ing into the pit of his stomach) Tra-la, little fellow, I've got a 
daiuty job for you. Do over my little ditty to the tune of Annie 
Eoonie, or Willow-tit-willow. 

Here's, then, to us all ! {Lifts his hat as a loving cup, and 
pledges the nine phantom Uncle Sams) 

A Toast to the blessed thirteen ! 
A Neo-pythagorean 
Glorious battle-paean! 

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UN"CLE SAM'S SHADOW 



Whaf s to be — includes what hath been ; 

But ifs more, more, more 

Than ever was dreamed of yore. 
So let's sing and bring it to being, 
And pray for its hastening and freeing : 

The God we can BE, and adore ! 

{Dithyramb of Uncle Sam's Mystical Number Thirteen) 



A 



Men hymned of old the sacred three ; 
Father, mother, and child. 
Three sides of one mystical figure, 
A symbol of life's true unity — 
No solitary tyrant : the living, ay. 
The mutually self -adoring divinity ! 
Holy, holy, most holy ! 



n 



Men sang of old the song of the four; 
The world-square diverse and equal. 
The rise and the set of the sun-orb, 
Th' twain poles of the whirling earth | 
'Tis the manifest, manifold reality, — 
Contenting, bewildering, all-inclusive :- 
Glorious, glorious, most glorious ! 



M 



So they chanted the tone of the human five:— 
For, vital, man standeth at the centre, and 
The four comers of the world thither bow to him. 



AND PHANTOM SELVES 



Yea, pursue him as he mounts the sky-summit, 
Where all things in radiance he gathereth : 
The world in him brought to self-knowledge ! 
Beautiful! beautiful! beautiful! 







So they intoned the spell of the awful six : — 

The fourfold horizon; in his zenith 

The noon sun rideth, down driving 

The shadow to the nethermost depth, where 

None living may pursue. ^Tis the world, with its 

Ever-triumphing good, yet with evil too: — 

Mysterious, mysterious, how mysterious ! 




Knit together, twain world's coequal — ' 
(With his zenith each and his nadir,) and 
The twelve star-signs of the zodiac 
Stand about the ecliptic resplendent ! 
Or, impose thou on the masterless world 
God's intimate home-love as law, and lo — 
In twelve, the full cycle perfection ! 

So ended the hymn of the ancient order. 

But One hath arrived now, and behold 

A vaster vision ! I shout to you 

My dithyramb in sacredest fury : 

Hark ! horrible, impious blasphemy ! 

The closed perfection shall be transcended :- 

Eevelation, revelation, revelation ! 

63 



UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 



Lo, the cycle perfection once closed, I open it 
With innovation, initiative^ freedom ! 
Of old, was the ancient not new once? 
And not truer when primevally newer so? 
When spontaneous, irresistible, wonderful? 
Old hemisphere, tremble lest it blast thee, 
My creation, new creation, my creation ! 

(Uncle Sam pauses, looks at the cycle of Nine, who seem hypno- 
tized, and as if transfusing all their vital powers into him) 

Ha, ha, boys ! Drink the Empyrean, 

And whoop it up with me ! 

Sing to my lucky number ! 

It is mine, you understand, my monopoly ! 

And I always knew it instinctively when they slandered it. 

A baker's dozen, forsooth, they called it? 

Then I baked a new loaf, in my oven of affliction. 

Of the ancient Bread of Life. 

For I tell you, there hath arisen 

And ascended to the zenith, and been received in glory. 

In the band of cosmic brotherhood, 

A New constellation, mine, mine, mine ! 

Thirteen states in one nation. 

Celestial and infernal and Eternal! 

Ay, my lucky number. 

Feared and hated 

Superstitiously, — 

Traduced how stupidly, viciously, 

My plucky number 

That surpasses 

All that hath been victorious, — 

That begetteth from molten masses 

The unknown disastrous, uproarious, 

64 



AND PHANTOM SELVES 



More beautiful and ever more glorious! 

Behold it is I, translated. 

The fated. 

The new created ! 

And my flag, 

My sky-rag — 

You can^t brag 

Too loudly, 

Nor wave too proudly — 

Floating, flaring, flapping 

To the stars' hand-clapping ! 

Reverent and devout to you. 

It is I, even I, who shout to you : 

You can't hang too high ! 

And you sha'n't die ! 

And cry 

To whoso dareth ask ''why?'': 

" 'Tis because 

Naught daunts or awes 

Life's law of laws. 

And a spirit of life am I !" 

(Uncle Sam, after madly waving his hat, looks about very much 
pleased to he, so far as he can see, alone) 

Ha, ha, boys! My song has been too much for your several 
hypertrophied brags. You've got telescoped, incorporated, di- 
gested. And you're very, very, very happy, I know, who best 
ought to, being perfectly acquainted with your whereabouts and 
present doings. All's well that ends well, isn't it ? And to think 
that I managed all this by my sole self, with an immortal Neo- 
pythagorean dithyramb improvised on the spot! Who needs to 
worry about army, or navy, coast defences, and air fleets ? 

(Benjamin Franklin enters and watches Uncle Sam with a quiet, 
benign amusement) 

And what's in order now? 

6B 



UNCLE SAM'S SHADOW 



Why a little apposite brag-song in my own honor, I guess 

likely. 
^'Ha! Ha! 
I did it. 

I couldn't kick out the impudent pretenders. 
They always came back fatally like boomerangs. 
How! now? 

I gobbled my shadow, and became straightway a glow-worm, 
A lightning-bug tousling the ^rose of dawn' ! 
I sang of Progress, Evolution 
Beyond foreseen conclusions and prophetic limits, 
And they faded into me, 
Calmly, unanimously; 
They were saved the bother of being distinct, separate, 

external. 
They are henceforth identified, diffused, and eternal 
With my identity, diffusion and eternity. 

total, delicate, benevolent assimilation! 

Yet I have established my autocracy democratically 
By the vote for voluptuously desired 
Nirvanic extinction in . . . 
What is all embracing and sufficient — ^ME! 
And I have established so my single yet complex con- 
sciousness I 

1 have vanquished that needlessly explicit and wasteful 

variety ! 
I have even absorbed the prophetically projected 
Implicit revelations — for they elected 
To fill me to aeonian satiety! 
Having soared high-flown 
Lo, I stand full grown 
In my station. 

And by that simple yet subtle operation — 
As of old — 
Sublimely alone V 

66 



AND PHANTOM SELVES 



(As Uncle Sam has sung his boastful song, the glow has grad- 
ually faded out of him and he looks down astonished at his 
person) 

Uncle Sam — 

Ha, what^s this? 

My phosphorescence gone ? 

So much the better, I must suppose ! 

For who would shine as a star, be fragrant as a rose? 

Inconvenient accomplishment, dubious bliss ! 

Fd rather rely on my brain and my brawn ! ! 

iWhat ? Who goes there ? You, Benny ? Was it not I after all, 
but you, perhaps, who worked the spell? and reduced chaos to 
cosmos ? the dark to a modest rational twilight ? and set me here 
in my right mind, nobly arrayed in my every-day togs ? 

(Benjamin Franhlin shakes his head comically, in denial) 

Oh, you needn't refuse to confess the truth. You're the only 
one, dead or alive, I could allow to snatch my peculiar laurels 
from me. If if s you did it, I owe you a debt for obligingly let- 
ting me think I was doing it while it happened; — for it was a 
monstrous Job: sanifying, clarifying, and unifying me after I 
indulged in this oriental auto-psycho-analysis. 

Now, thank heaven, we are bound once more in common 
sense, and can attend to practical affairs of state. Sit down, 
Uncle Benny, and lef s have it out once and for all. You have 
spied out the enemy, and come to what conclusion about them? 



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THE FINAL SELECTION OF THE COMMITTEE 
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Benjamin Franklin — ' 

"Knaves and nettles are akin 
Stroke them kindly, and thejr'U sting." 

Uncle Sam — ^So, you're like me, veering to a more strenuous do- 
mestic policy? Still, couldn't we somehow manage to spare 
ourselves so much remorse ? A gallon or two of the milk of hu- 
man kindness should suffice to drug them, and then we would 
manage their affairs in the interim. When they sober up they'd 
never care to own they hadn't been compos mentis, and they 
would pretend to agree with all we've done, and that they, in- 
deed, voted it so. Isn't that a pleasanter way of dealing with 
the situation? 

Benjamin Franklin — 

"Drink and drink more and still unsatisfied; 
Drink till drink drowned him, and he thirsty died." 

Uncle 'Sam — Your saws always make Pat cut his own limb from 
the tree trunk, and precipitate him headlong into the briers! 
Do you think a little liberal education, and moral and religious 
culture — non-sectarian and seemingly atheistic — would minister 
to ungodly pride in these invading hordes? Would that be a 
dangerous expedient? 

Benjamin Franklin — 

"To be proud of knowledge, is to be blind with light. 
To be proud of virtue, is to be poisoned with an overdose of 
the antidote." 

Uncle Sam — I see, it's absurd. Still, you would agree it might 
work out well ; and with my invariable luck, anything that's pos- 
sible is more than likely. I've been a fool, I own it. I've fed 
them fat, and made them suppose that comfort's a mark of 
nobility. They're political parvenus, and they haven't the 
proper sense of the inherited good fortune of being native 
Americans. 

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HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 



Benjamin Franklin — 

"No blood is as old 
As mud or gold." 

Uncle Sam — 'So you suggest the cure for mud-slinging is a mud- 
bath, and for gold-greed, an overdose of aurum potabile? I 
guess it wouldn^t take forty acres of bad land and two legs of a 
mule apiece to turn any one of the worst radicals into an all- 
fired conservative. 

Benjamin Franklin — I didn't mean to imply that dollars count 
more than the man, or that mud is fairer than a fair dame. 

But what I did mean is, there's no use making them feel 
they can never really penetrate into the inmost circle. 

Uncle Sam — ^And get certificated as adopted progeny — of our 
Colonial dames and sires? 

Benjamin Franklin — As long as the female section of your 
population systematically covers domestic labor with unjust con- 
tempt, are you surprised that only foreigners will serve in your 
home? As long as you revive the false standards on which the 
old nobilities rested, what appears to have been the use of abolish- 
ing titles, and primogeniture and entail ? 

Can't you see that a fated social exclusion hurts worse than 
a tax on tea? Eemember, Sam, set up desert and good man- 
ners, and social interest as the standard, and all will go to school 
and pay the tuition fee to become acceptable. As for the pedi- 
gree, in ten generations my descendant has exactly — notice, ifs 
an unpronounceable fraction — l/l,022th part of my egregious 
person, probably his only noteworthy ancestor. 

Uncle Sam — iSo, you argue for the children of the soil, and that 
they're all one with angels from heaven, if they have or get the 
right stuff, and accept the constitution? That seems fair. But 
I tell you it isn't feasible. There's our women folk to reckon 
with — as you shrewdly observed — and they're unbudgeable, unre- 
constructed, and they, tho' I hate to admit it, they do boss 
the ranch. 

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I'm deadly sick of all this negotiation. If my detractors 
knew how dangerous I am when unduly provoked, I think 
they'd come to terms. I just feel like exploding — and scattering 
annihilation. 

These arid sands need extensive lime deposits ; and as for the 
immediate requirements of the atmosphere, we could get a 
million incubators and raise buzzards enough in no time. And 
if you ever set your mind on destruction — not to mention Tesla, 
Marconi, 'Maxim and my own native wizards — Fulton, Morse, 
Wilbur Wright, my great juggler Edison, and my prophet 
Burbank, I just wonder what would be left of this inhuman ref- 
use? I guess we've pretty nearly by this hardened our hearts 
Teutonically against unprofitable sentiment. 

Benjamin Franklin — 

"The brave and the wise can pity and excuse. 
Where cowards and fools no mercy refuse." 

Uncle Sam — 'What, you've not turned "peace at any price" ? Oh, 
I see, you're poking fun at me ! Yes, yes, there's no getting out 
of it. I started out this way, and there's no use getting the laugh 
on me by my losing my temper. 

Benjamin Franklin — I'm glad your device — not so exceedingly 
novel a resort of exasperated human nature — is put off to a more 
convenient season. 

Uncle Sam — ^Yes, yes, we'll do everything decently and in order. 
Discover at once a committee fit to represent me, and trust to 
palaver, diplomacy, and appeals to the invisible beauty of the 
average soul. 

Benjamin Franklin — But why, my son, don't we at the least 
affect despatch — that virtue incumj)ent on men in whom reposes 
as a trust the direction of public affairs? We Colonials, you 
know, were not ready to impute pre-eminence to any man of an- 
other commonwealth, without most excellent cause. Yet all 
alike acknowledged His Excellency, the general-in-chief, as even 
more extraordinarily distinguished for his knowledge of men 

73 



HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 



and astute judgment of policies, than for the possession of the 
talents peculiar to the soldier and the administrator. 

Unci^ Bam — ^But I\e changed my mind. There sha'n't be more 
than four fingers to my right hand, and the thumb shall be re- 
served to myself. Then in case of a tie I'll cast the decisive 
vote. Novr, can you see the Father of his Country as one of the 
four — with you as the middle finger ? He may have been modest, 
you know, but he had a sufficient sense of his singular worth, and 
what became his dignity. I always cherished a shrewd suspi- 
cion that if those British military men had been less uppish 
with him in his youth, who knows whether he'd have been so 
strong for my unfashionable cause in later life? He wouldn't 
have preferred tatters to style ! Not he, who ordered, according 
to his original formulas, his own clothes, always made of the 
best materials in the latest London swagger ! 

Of course, at bottom, ifs just only reverence and gratitude 
prompt me to exclude him from our official committee. 

Benjamin Franklin — ^And, furthermore, you think you could 
in any event avail yourself of his judgment ? Now thanks to his 
noble nature you may. He sent you upon my request his en- 
grossed opinion as to the most suitable persons to be selected for 
this important mission; altho' I assure you he was very properly 
reluctant to obtrude, unsolicited by yourself, his opinion. 

Uncle Sam — Good! Let's inspect his ticket. It can't hurt. 

There's safety in the multitude of counsellors. 
Benjamin Franklin — Which usually lead to determinations in 

agreement with whatsoever one pleased before consultation. 

Uncle Sam — ^Acute you are ! I never resent one more suggestion 

from even the best and wisest of men. 
Benjamin Franklin — Shall I read off the roll of honor? 

Uncle Sam — ^Do, do; and as tho' you were at the court of the 
French Louis. 

Benjamin Franklin — Nathaniel Greene, dashing and ingenious 
campaigner. Eobert Morris, of Willing & Morris, merchants, 

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well known and respected in Philadelphia. Colonel Alexander 

Hamilton, mightier with the pen even than with the sword. 

Jonathan TmmbnU, Grovernor's assistant, deputy-governor, and, 

finally, governor of the great state of Connecticut forty-nine 

years all told. 
Uncle Sam — Must have been slow as molasses in zero weather, 

or hadn^t they but one male nutmeg? Let^s consider them 

seriatim, verbatim and literatim. 
Benjamin Franklin — -You remember Nathaniel Greene? 
Uncle Sam — Thank you. I^m not in my second dotage. TaU, he 

was, strong, vigorous. I like his looks: broad of the brows, a 

trifle full in the cheeks, like a boy stealing apples. His frank, 

big eyes do my heart good. 
Benjamin Franklin — He was of Quaker persuasion. 
Uncle Sam — That's not against him, since he was of fighting 

stock aU the same. If his father was a first-day preacher, from 

second day to sixth he was an honest if sooty blacksmith and be- 

powdered miller! 
Benjamin Frai^klin — ^Born in stubborn little Rhode Island — 

the last plantation to accept the Constitution. 
Uncle Sam — He mended that record, settling in hot-headed 

Georgia. 
Benjamin Franklin — He outwitted Cornwallis from Catawba 

to Dan. 
Uncle Sam — -Any colonial leader was liable to do that, by just 

pitting naked horse sense and gumption and geography, got by 

jogging, against tactical rules and official maps. 
Benjamin Franklin — Extremely ingenious and inventive too 

was he. 
Uncle Sam — Made up those amphibious vehicles — ^keels for the 

swollen rivers, and cart-wheels for the rutty roads? Yes, that 

was cute ! 

Benjamin Franklin — He enjoyed the entire confidence of the 
army of the South. 

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HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 



UncIaE Sam — Yet didn't, somehow, make a national success? 
Thaf s where I touch his weak spot. Any corporal ought to be 
restlessly biding his time to become commander-in-chief. Can 
you see him in the shoes of His Excellency? Not I. Perhaps 
that recommended him, you know. Even great men favor the 
loyal second-rater. Let's consider the next nominee. Forgotten 
him almost by this. 

Benjamin Franklin — Robert Morris. 

Uncle Sam — Ay, so many of that name. Meant originally Moor- 
ish, I believe? Moorish dance and then, just country good- 
fellowship ? 

Can't place him at all. 

Benjamin Franklin — Truly, you amaze me. He was one of our 
real benefactors. In deed, that is, and not in word only. 

Uncle Sam — Wait a minute. This Robert Bruce must have done 
some whopping thing. 

Benjamin Franklin — Nothing, it seems, that looms very large 
in any mind now. He merely financed the Revolution. 

Uncle Sam — And at a profit, eh? 

Benjamin Franklin — No charges were ever proven. 

Uncle Sam — That's to his credit immensely — after oflBcial in- 
vestigations conducted under his own supervision? 

Benjamin Franklin — Seriously, he saved the credit of the colo- 
nies. It can be truthfully said that it was he, therefore, who 
established American Independence. 

Uncle Sam — Ah, I remember now. It was he tried to economize 
in the army appropriations by reducing the number of the of- 
ficers and augmenting that of the privates? If so, that really 
was unusually smart. 

Benjamin Franklin — He filled honorably the office of Superin- 
tendent of Finance, and was also Agent of Marine, to nurse the 
unfortunate infant navy. He didn't think one could carry on a 
war to victory on quibbles and puns. He furnished the army with 
lead and rations. And the good ship America, there wasn't 

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money to finish, he gave to King Louis to square his country's 
overdue obligations. 
Uncle Sam— And get rid incidentally of a bad investment ? Very 
handsome I 

According to you, then, he did aU the dirty work, and didn't 
give a continental for calumny. 

Benjamin Franklin — He tried to rouse the inefficient, mutually 
distrustful state-legislatures from their torpor. For a long time 
it seemed as though he were preaching to the dead. He effected 
a loan with the French General, staking his personal estate and 
honor as security. I understand the nature and difficulty of such 
services, because, while not privileged to render them, I did a 
little financing in early life. I was not unconnected vdth the 
commissariat. 

Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, yes, you did go in for supplying the British 
with mules in the French Indian wars! But was he really 
straight like you? 

Benjamin Fkanklin — 'He was much maligned by the irrespon- 
sible, but the substantial men of his day honored him. 

Uncle Sam — *And of course he died — a multi-miUionaire ! 

Benjamin Franklin — ^^Sad to relate, no. He was tracked from 
place to place by bailiffs, and in the end suffered imprisonment at 
Prune Street for debt as a bankrupt. 

Uncle Sam — ^You don't mean to say he failed 9 Scandalous ! 

Benjamin Franklin — Yes, but with honor. And he advised his 
son to keep ever within bounds. "You will grow rich fast 
enough,'' said he, "and enjoy yourself much more than if you 
overstrain as I have done, and try to provide too amply for your 
family." He was a man of imagination, but he was ahead of his 
times. He bore ill fortune with philosophy and dignified cour- 
age to the last. 

Uncle Sam — I guess we can't have both a General and a financier 
on a committee that's to deal with that rabble tea-party up yon- 
der. They mightn't like it at all. I must admit, it would hardly 

77 



HIS FINAL COMMITTEiB 



be complimentary ! A General — who never capitalized politically 
his successes, and a financier-^who managed public affairs glor- 
iously, and yet let his own suffer by an unnatural divorce ? 

Benjamin Franklin — ^You're very cynical and severe, Samuel; 
and I don^t see how you dare to attach such disproportionate 
importance to success, when so much of it, as you best know, is 
luck or lack of temptation. 

Uncle Sam — I'm peculiar, maybe, but I can't help it. So, 
"Next!" I say. 

Benjamin Fbanklin — ^Alexander Hamilton: the intimate heart- 
ener of our General-in-chief and the strong right arm of our 
first President, the chief joint author of the Federalist. 

Uncle SAM^Ay, ay, I remember him quite well. A staunch 
friend of strong central government; and he, mind you, just 
next to his great principal. It's perfectly self-evident and 
natural. If he'd had his way, that Newport Yankee King from 
the old Dominion wouldn't have remained a mere old wives' 
tale! 

Think of it, too, he was born in Bermuda — a foreigner under 
the British flag ! 

Benjamin Franklin — As to the flag, who of us saw a better float 
over his cradle? 

Uncle Sam — Tut, tut. Where I saw the light, there wasn't ever 
an}i:hing foreign: and I guess you, for one, were naturalized be- 
fore birth in your inmost predestination. 

Benjamin Franklin — lAt all events, Hamilton was loyally brave 
and efficient. He gave his life for his adopted country, all the 
more his, mind you, because of will, and not of accident — ^his. 

Uncle Sam — ^Do you call birth an accident? Well, well; but be 
that as it may. I call that election to grace. 

No, I can't forgive him his lack of insight into character. 
Why, didn't he know what that political swash-buckler was after 
— Aaron Burr, Emperor of Blennerhasset and near-President of 
the United States? And if he saw into his traitor soul, why 
hadn't he the moral courage to refuse his own loyal body, that 

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was mine, not his, as a target for the villain ? And if he hadn't 

that, why then was he so soft as not to shoot his challenger 

through the heart first, and settle the score with his conscience 

later? 
Benjamin Franklin — ^It was an unfortunate and reprehensible 

custom among gentlemen. 
Uncle Sam — Tut, tut. I wont have a near-suicide on any life 

and death mission of mine. 
Benjamin Franklin — ^I hesitate now to name the last: Jonathan. 

TrumbuU, the capable organizer and civil administrator. 

Uncle Sam — And permanent governor ? 

Benjamin Franklin — He was a true and stalwart friend ; a great 
helper of our cause throughout our dark days. 

Uncle Sam — ^Brother Jonathan? 

Benjamin Franklin — That, they say, was but a jesting address 
of his admirer, the General-in-chief . 

Uncle Sam — ^A reference to David's little death-ditty "Sweeter 
than love of Woman"? How many, I wonder? Because he 
could be found in sacred scripture, didn't he come very near to 
ousting me from my unrivalled place as the National Genius? 

Benjamin Franklin — Your taste is very precise, and somewhat 
biased by personal considerations. 

Uncle Sam — ^So it should be, in selecting colleagues worthy of 
my admirable boyhood counsellor and friend. 

I wont have one of those four worthies. No man without 
proper instinct of self-preservation, or what I term sanctifigump- 
tion; no man who hasn't the kind of tough constitution to sur- 
vive till he's a pronounced success; no one who's born in Liver- 
pool and winds up in prison for debt; no man who was content 
to live and die in his own state without a continental ambition ! 
They were all good men and true, as proved by the fact that they 
won and retained the friendship and good opinion of His Excel- 
lency. But I want pickings from a wider field in time and 
space than your narrow colonial cow pasture ! 

79 



HIS FIKAL COMMITTEE 



Benjamin Franklin — So we're back where we started, like the 
hunted hare or fox. 

Uncle Sam — Like the sun and the moon too, Benny. And we've 

got one inestimable advantage — a clean slate! Besides, I've an 

f idea. You nominate the best man yon can think of (always 

• omitting my honored Lord of Mount Vernon on the Potomac), 

and let your choice in turn do likewise, and so on. 

IBenjamin Franklin — ^But if you find fault with them — 
frivolously ? 

Uncle Sam— 'I'll waive petty objections, except such as well up out 
of my inner consciousness with irresistible fury like an oil 
gusher. 

Benjamin Franklin — -At length I see the day gild the Eastern 
hills! 

My nominee derives from Welsh lineage. His antecedents 
looked on Mount Snowdon. By fits, the ancestral mountain 
haunted him; at least, he was moodish and erratic. His bursts 
of enthusiasm alternated with hesitancies and spells of keen criti- 
cism. He was, in a word, a poet, but his frenzied fancy moved 
in the domain of practical interests. He dreamed, but it was 
only of the actual welfare of his fellow-men to the remotest gen- 
erations. Then too, he had always most excellent good fortune 
at moments of danger and difficulty. 

Uncle Sam — "Good luck's" more than half of sane genius. So 
far, so good. And "practical"? Was he that? It's the mark of 
a genuine inspiration! 

Benjamin Franklin — He abhorred strife, and was therefore a 
reluctant revolutionist. Perhaps, like Morris, he hoped at first 
for a reconciliation with the mother country. Once started, how- 
ever, nothing could stop him. The trail of his logic caught fire. 

Uncle Sam— ^Ah, he went on a bee line to the limit ! I like that. 
Always makes interesting reading. 

Benjamin Franklin— He couldn't help it. It was like the 
divinely ordained madness of an ancient prophet: Civil liberty, 

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freedom of thought, separation of Church and State, education^ 
for the plain man ! And, always, Liberty ! 

Uncle ^am — And yet he wasn't a mere theorist? He made things 
happen and hum? 

Benjamin Feanklin — ^Well, he wasn't so consistent but that he 
didn't refrain from acquiring a bad title cheap, when it pro- 
cured for his people a claim to half a continent! At first he 
was afraid of the Constitution, as likely to foster tyranny; but 
he was converted to it, when once himself invested with the pre- 
rogatives of the supreme executive, which, it is said, he used like 
a benevolent monocrat. 

Uncle Sam — 1 can forgive all that, because of his hitching his 
horse to the White House fence. I dote on his fervent belief in 
the people. Of course, he was a sceptic as to revealed religion? 

Benjamin Feanklin — ^He set forth a broad religion of states- 
manship and of civilized humanitarian kindness. He was strong, 
too, in aSirming that his theories of government were founded in 
eternal truth, so he didn't lack for dogma. As to his eschatology 
— I can say he looked to the Golden Age of free inquiry ahead. 

Uncle Sam — ^And once he had a whopping majority back of him, 
he could whack a minority into shape and induce it to see light ? 

Benjamin Feanklin — And yet he feared that if a navy were built 
up to respectable size it would bring to birth a disposition to 
"swagger and hector" hopelessly, inimical to free institutions. He 
believed that he himself was merely the representative of a sov- 
ereign people, and his will therefore absolute for the time being as 
the people's will. He wanted to imify and nationalize the states. 
Although a Virginian first and last, and objecting in theory to 
national improvements, he promoted all that might "make lines 
of separation disappear" until the "interests of all were identi- 
fied." For he foresaw that "only so and gradually could their 
union be cemented with indissoluble ties." 

Uncle Sam — ^Enough ! Agreed. The author of the immortal Dec- 
laration shall be easily the second on our committee of Pacifica- 
tion. He had his faults, but he composed the first Chapter in 

81 



HIS FIKAL COMMITTEE 



my Genesis : Intelligent public opinion is the voice of God ; All 
natural rights are inalienable, by sale or contract; Government 
exists to secure these rights, and not for the emolument of the 
governing classes ; The test of its justice is in the consent of the 
governed ; The people has an innate right to inaugurate reforms 
— the right of private judgment being extended from the individ- 
ual conscience to the people as a whole, in matters of happiness 
and safety here below ; And yet, for all our determination to have 
no grand Mogul or other nuisances, we shall go it slow, and 
tolerate no upsets for light and transient reasons. That was a 
Political Gospel ! 

Ho, here, sage of Monticello, you're wanted, if you did get 
eaten out of house and home from sheer pride of hospitality. 
And for all your six feet, haven't you got a refined and delicate 
countenance ? But your eyes dodge mine — I guess you had your 
little secrets. Almost tempts one to believe that undignified 
tittle-tattle about lady killing and secret disregard of the color 
line! 

Come, I'll forgive you your hatred of G. W.'s levees, I'm not 
so dead sure about them myself. And I'll forgive your sly, round- 
about ways of assailing his character, when you were a member of 
his official household. That may have been conscientious in you, 
although it wasn't very square. And I'll forgive you all 
your reckless insinuations as to the duty of rebellion, when the 
character of the governor happens to be judged "infamous" by 
the populace that isn't privileged to know the inside facts of 
the case! 

See up yonder? That's what the rabble appeals to now. Go 
and make amends for those little slips of yours, Thomas of 
Monticello ! And say, for all your petty weaknesses, I like you, 
though I can't tell why, Guess you were all-fired magnetic. 
Let's shake. 

Thomas Jefferson — I'm afraid it is difiicult for us. 

Uncle Sam — To see ourselves as others see us? Oh, you mean 
you're to me impalpable still ? Our hands can't grip each other ? 

8^ 



OF PACIFICATION 



Well then, Benny, do it for ine. I guess historical Spooks can 
fetch each other^s pump-handle effectively. 

Benjamin Franklin — Now, Samuel, is the honorable Mr. Jeffer- 
son to select the next man who is most likely in his opinion to 
prove useful at the crisis we confront ? 

Uncle SAM—^Without a doubt, doubting Thomas. Fix on a 
first*-rater out of hand. 

Thomas Jefferson— It is a responsibility I shall not shirk. 
And with your favor, my choice falls on a man robust, agile, 
wiry, with a long head and slim face, wild shock of straight red- 
dish hair, and piercing blue eyes. For he vindicates my faith in 
the plain people. His speech was illiterate. His manners were 
imcouth. But he was endowed with childlike simplicity, un- 
flinching courage, and stubborn will. Men said, his were the 
rugged virtues. "He knew no fear, and gave the devil no 
quarter." 

Uncle Sam— 'But was he native born ? 

Thomas Jefferson — Of a father, moreover, fresh from Ireland — 
which illustrates the inherent rights of man. He built a rude 
log-hut in his clearing in the mountains of North Carolina. 
When a mere lad, his widowed mother destined him for the 
sacred ministry. But he refused to avail himself of any oppor- 
tunities for study. 

Uncle Sam — Native genius, that sprouts right up like a 
Turk^s head lily, and lifts a spire of multiple splendor on a man- 
high shaft, to startle the bumble-bees and the humming-birds? 

Thomas Jefferson — He excelled in rough and tumble sports: 
running, jumping, wrestling. He was brave but mischievous and 
overbearing; quick and violent of temper. By Hanging Rock 
he was a prisoner of war at thirteen. 

Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, that's true. He knew enough to honor my 
mystic number, costing the British his keep, if he couldn't pick 
them off as a sharp-shooter any more. Lots more useful so, than 
dead. 

83 



HIS PINAL COMMITTEE 



Thomas Jeffeeson — lAt twenty-one he crossed the mountains to 

the wilds of Tennessee. 
UNOtE Sam — He foresaw a fat thing, and got in on the ground 

floor. Good for him. 

Thomas JeffeesoN' — ^Those were rough days, when the women 
picked wild berries, and the men hoed corn among the burned 
stumps of the clearings, while the older settlers were told off 
to watch, gun in hand, for the redskins. The rest everybody 
remembers, even a well-read and cultured, up-to-date inhabitant 
of the Atlantic coast. He practised law, riding through dense 
forests from settlement to settlement, armed to the teeth and 
ready for the worst He raised and kept effective, to beat back 
the Creek savages, an army of imdisciplined settlers with rations 
of acorns and his brandished pistol under their noses. He cared 
not one whit for instructions that ran counter to success. He 
won against the veterans, that had fought Napolean to a stand- 
still in Spain, at the battle of New Orleans, after terms were 
agreed upon, and offset so the dishonor of our capital set in 
flames, and the secret proposals of Massachusetts and Connecticut 
to conclude an inglorious private peace. 

Uncle Saim — Hurrah for Old Hickory ! Always doted on his grim, 
hatchet-face and rugged virtues ! Granted the devil no quarter ! 
Couldn't in a stand-up fight give his enemy the satisfaction of 
knowing he'd landed — till he packed him off to Kingdom 
Come ! Hurrah ! 

Of course he had his peccadillos. He whispered into the 
ears of both my elephant and my donkey that perfidious insin- 
uation : "To the victor belong the spoils," The tariff was rough- 
hewn by him and scaled down by way of compromise; and he 
kicked the great bank, Robert Morris was at such pains to organ- 
ize, all over the circumambient landscape. Maybe he was wrong. 
Who can decide at this day? But he was mettlesome and live- 
ly; fine company for getters of news; kept the atmosphere 
tingling with his doings. , He was right so far — ^men shall own 
money, and not money any man ; varied home production is more 

84 



OF PACIPICATION 



important than cheapness or even quality of goods consumed; 
national self-respect comes first every time, correctness of atti- 
tude and diplomatic suavity long ways after, with other super- 
fluous baggage. And he did what no other man ever did — ^made 
South Carolina eat and enjoy her own nettles, French-fried. 
No nullification ! No nonsense ! He got in his lick first all the 
time fore and aft] 

Say, old boy, don't be so bashful. You remember when the 
chief magistracy was first proposed, you protested : ''Don't think 
of it ! I haven't the first qualifications ! I'm a rough, plain man. 
The idea is absurd !" But you yielded reluctantly to the good 
opinions of the discerning, and placed yourself in the hands of 
your good friends for the best interests of the country; and so 
your example has been followed since several times. Once in the 
chair, a yellow jacket couldn't settle within a mile. And your 
kitchen cabinet sat on the back stoop, while you expounded to 
them the thing you alone knew — what was good and right in 
your eyes, on every question under the shining canopy. 

I'm tired singing your praises to the gallery gods, that 
twinkle, twinkle high in the sky. Inventor of the pocket veto ! 
Come and stand up for yourself ! 

(Enters Andrew Jackson) 

Ha, ha, Andy my boy, let me introduce you to the founder of 

the first State University, 
Thomas Jeffeeson — ^Who had the humble merit, sir, however, of 

advocating the union of agriculture with classical learning. 
Benjamin Franklin — I'm glad to make the acquaintance of so 

honest and zealous a servant of the commonwealth. 
Uncle Sam — Of course you know each other. And if s your turn 

now to nab us a first-rater who'll join you in my ticklish business. 

Andrew Jackson — I'm greatly obliged for your kind con- 
sideration. 

Uncle Sam — ^And I, for your reputed way of settling a dispute on 
punctilio. Do you remember? It was between a pure Castilian 

85 



HIS FINAL COMMITTEE 



importation and the representative of gay Paree. It would jog- 
gle my tombstone if I could think of it in my grave ! To see you 
hopping in on one foot while pulling on your other Jackboot, 
smack into the august and gracious presences— the mutually ag- 
grieved ambassadors ! That's the way to settle disputes between 
senors and monsieurs, and all other hagglers about precedence 
and bric-a-brac. I'll accept your picked man in advance, you 
who're grand-dad of lone-star Texas, thro' Sam Houston, that 
tough son of your Creek campaign days ! 

Andrew Jackson — ^Well, I'm not good at parlez-vousing , and so 
I've set my heart right off on a man like myself in some ways : 
straight, downright, coarse, but luckier than I — ^got killed in 
the nick of time, for his greater fame; and didn't get fooled, 
like me, by little Martin Van! Raised in a log cabin— like 
Tippecanoe and myself. 

Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, whooping it up for "the boys as wield the 
plough and the spade"? Hard-cider camp meetings, and con- 
versions to the rough-and-ready, hardy, doughty, bend-and-never- 
break stuff of my brawny West? 

Andrew Jackson — I don't mean the man who died for lack of an 
overcoat at his inauguration, run plumb crazy by place hunters ! 
I mean a stouter man; tho' old Tippecanoe did win a great vic- 
tory in his day. 

Uncle Sam^ — The Rail Splitter, you've in mind? my dear old 
honest Abe ? 

Benny, what's the matter with us, that we left it to Old 
Hickory to hit it off like this? 

Benjamin Franklin — We think least, it often happens, of those 
we love best ; and reserve our good manners for strangers. 

Uncle Sam — Here with you. Old Abe ! No delay. This is the hour 
for your gentle sense of humor. And they say, when you started 
for Washington, D. C, you went to weed your old Dad's grave, 
and pay the respect of a tear to Nancy Hanks, or was it maybe 
your stepmother? You handed out to the old ne'er-do-weels 
all the credit ! That fetches moisture to my eye every time. 

86 



OF PACIFICATION 



{Lincoln appears, very grave and solemn) 

Hip, hip, hurrah, boys ! 

Hug him for me, Andy of the Hermitage, and you too, 
Thomas of Monticello. 

Not so stand-of&sh. Don't sidle and ogle. Don't bare-back 
on your dignity. It's a case of pure theory, and of rough-and- 
ready practice bear-hugging a bit of both, when you three meet, 
Thomas, Andy and Abe! 

{Turning overjoyed and proud to Benjamin FranUin, who 
stands benignly aloof) Who ever in all the world from before 
Noah, and down to my own mighty Duckhunter, and my irre- 
pressible lion-tamer, and the fair phrase-coiner from Scholar's 
town, could corrall such a thundering monoculous big four as 
you — except me, only ME ? Why, I've got to jig for joy — ^posi- 
tively jig and jiggle. 

{Pointing at Benjamin Franklin) Kind sirs, up yonder, I 
send you my tact and my common sense. He's chairman, and 
don't forget — there's a reason. 

{Pointing at Thomas Jefferson) He's my humanitarian en- 
thusiasm, and my political and economic idealism; honey-sweet 
to the taste, but mind the sting in the tail. 

{Pointing at Andrew Jachson) — Here's my Handy Andy: 
Quick action, never stop for etiquette and legal quibbles that 
would keep you from bagging the big game, and always deal 
the devil a knockout blow before he bats his eye ! 

{Pointing to Abraham Lincoln) And here's Abraham, my 
only, my lonely! Linkhorn was his name once? I tell you he 
was a link-hearts all around, as well as hands. He was justice, 
gentlemen, sympathy, moral courage and a little homely joke in 
the darkest hour. 

{Turning to his committee) And the best of it is, boys — 
with you four as the clover leaf — I can be the stem ; — for I feel 
somehow as if I'd personally been you, and everyone of you me — 
just ME and nothing less ! 

87 



VI. 

A NIGHTMARE VISION OF OLD WORLD 
CONQUERORS 



VI. 

Uncle Sam (Whispering to Benjamin Franhlin) — Hush! Who'd 
believe it? There's genius in the Sam family. What's on now 
isn't any everyday skylarking. 

Benjamin Franklin — A case of sleep-walking, it would appear. 

Andrew Jackson — ^Ay, you can't draw the line sharp between 
madness and religion. Ought to be authority on this point, 
myself. 

Benjamin Franklin — It's Jessamine Magnolia, Mr. Jefferson, 
you knew her intimately in her infancy. 

Andrew Jackson — 'A prophetess to the rescue? Or will she voo- 
doo us? 

Uncle Sam {To Lincoln) — ^You ought to know, for it's you 
brought discipline to bear, in her instance, tho' with malice 
toward none, as you said, and with charity toward all. Abe, I 
just bet you, if she's in good trim, she'll make Jael and Deborah 
green with envy. She's wide awake enough. But once an idea 
takes a grip on her, stop her if you can. Not a tidal-wave, or an 
earthquake could, tho' a real barbecue might! Andy, she'll do 
for us the Miriam vertigo over Pharaoh by the sands of the Eed 
'Sea, to the yqtj snatch of ragtime Elijah hummed when he 
slaughtered the Prophets of Baal with such remarkable unanim- 
ity by the brook Kishon. Ha, ha, but I'm proud of her ! {Look- 
ing at Jessamine Magnolia fondly) 

Benjamin Franklin — ^She comes straight up to you, looking 
neither to the right hand nor to the left. 

Uncle Sam — ^Why should she single out any of you for special 
attention, when, chosen because of your representative character, 
you're all really implied in me? {Shaking Tiis fist humorously 
at the top of the canyon) She isn't saying nothing for nothing, 
not she ! She's just too full for utterance. Wouldn't care to be 
in your present situation. When the prodigal daughter returns, 
she can eat a fatted-calf whole, and I'm sorry for what she'll do 

91 



NIGHTMARE VISION OF 



to any Bull of Barfhan that's inconsiderate ! You see my family 
suffices for all purposes. I've appointed a committee just for 
form's sake to attend in style to your pacification. But she 
Cometh, see, the desired of our nation. 

And she'll sing us her ditty 
Sans maudlin pity. 

Decidedly well-intentioned; 
For a clean sweep 
Of your whole heap, — 

No singular casualties mentioned ; 
Not a widow bereft. 
Or an orphan left 
To be comforted, coddled and — pensioned! 

{Jessamine Magnolia^ having solemnly come forward, fixes her 
abstracted gaze on Uncle Sam) 

father, I fear not the foe, but thy scorn 
Of their hordes, and their ribald passion. 

For I dreamed that the sun of thy roseate morn. 

And thy golden noon, had sunk forlorn 

In blood and blaze. 

And a murky haze 

On the morrow 

Lifted from deserts charred and ashen 

Their trailing veils of sorrow! 

Uncle Sam — 

Ah, child, thou deemest my star shall 

Be quenched yet in mire at the last ? 
What heroes can mad hordes marshall 

That thou starest so wan and aghast? 

Lo, I pledge my foes with laughter 

And I blow a blast of my mouth, 
That about and before them and after 

From North and West and South, ' 

92 



OLD WORLD CO^^QUERORS 

In fast Niagaras spilled, run 

Vast roaring jubilant seas — 
My myriad newborn children, 

To swallow them quick with ease! 

Ha, ha, my old glory emerges. 

With the dew of her morning birth, 
From dancing golden surges; 

A new heaven on a new earth. 

Jessamine Magnolia (Having seemed to listen^, she suddenly fixes 
with rapt stare a particular point of the canyon-rim) — 

(HANNIBAL) 

Ha, who is yon mighty man, father — 

Swart, sinewy, massy, keen — 
That the rabbles of races gather 

And swarm to, as bees to their queen? 

To shatter thy Roman dominion 

With barbaric hate high-soul'd. 
The ghostly Carthaginian 

Hath sworn his oath as of old. 

Tusked elephants trumpet and thunder. 

And potsherds of vipers hail, 
And the Roman world quakes under 

Hannibal, terror of Baal ! 

(Turning to another point of the canyon rim she takes up her 
inspired burden) 

(alaeic) 
Who shakes like a tawny lion 

His locks, and his blue eyes stare? 
His wrath — the whirlwind they fly on. 

And the lightning of their glare ? 

93 



NIGHTMARE VISION OF 



"To the plains from the moimtaiii passes 

Ho, leap ye, my warriors blithe! — 
For, the denser and taller the grass is 

The daintier to mow with the scythe. 

''Be ye fat with surfeit and flaccid, 

'Tis Alaric cleanseth the folk." 
Thrice Eome hath he ta^en. Lo, he sacks it. 

And guffaws at his Gothic joke ! 

(At another point Jessamine Magnolia, fascijiated and terror- 
stricken, -fixes another figure) 

(attila) 

What grim, flat head would affright us 

Like a boa's of monstrous size ? 
With the Hunnish dance of St. Vitus, 

Wide nostrils and glittery eyes? 

From China's wall to the Bosphorus 

A crown of thorns and a rod; 
From the Rhine to Rome — a cross for us; 

Hail, scourge of a maniac God! 



Lo, Hannibal's, Alaric's fury 

And Attila's madness return. 
For the oath of Tell in Uri, 

And the faith of our sires we spurn. 

{Jessamine Magnolia, with a tragic gesture, singles out a vision^ 
ary figure in the centre of the vast concourse) 

(jENGHis khan) 

Ho, yonder the fire and sword of Khorassan, 

Bockhara's sacker, the Khan, 
To the minareted mosque in triumph doth pass on, 

The Tartar trampler of man 1 

94 



OLD WOELD CONQUBROES 

"Iran, and Ind and Cathay, ye amassed your 

Splendor for me ! Here am I ! 
Where the hay is cut, my steeds shall pasture. 

And splash hot blood to the sky!'' 

So when he expired, the land they harried 

To his capital city, and spread 
Desolation to right and to left, as they carried 

Earth's lord thro' a lane of the dead! 

{Jessamine Magnolia sweeps the horizon several times, then sud- 
denly claps her hands and cries with a fresh access of fury) 

(timuelang) 
Unkempt red hanks; from his lips a drooped crescent; 

Shag brows in his forehead shrink; 
Deep-socketed narrow eyes, that incessant 

Like a tiger's in sunshine blink. 

From Samarkand his anger savage 
Doth burn to the frozen waste. 
And the tropic Ganges his ice-gusts ravage, 
'Till the Orient sea he faced, 

Where the fever unhorsed and slew the giant! 

In an ebon bier was he swathed, 
With musk and amber the God-defiant 

In attar of roses bathed! 

But from deep sleep waking, by silver Oxus 

Tamerlane leaps with his spear; 
From the East he swoops, in the West he blocks us 
And would choke us with panic fear. 

(Jessamine Magnolia goes up to Uncle Sam, both hands plead- 
ingly extended to make him see for himself and believe) 

Father, father, my vision wasn't a mere delusion. Yonder 
they come, united in fell purpose. I can't tell you which is 
more murderous and dreadful. Hannibal, the Punic demon, 

95 



NIGHTMARE VISION OF 



Alaric, the Goth, Attila, the Hun, Jenghis khan, the Tartar, 
Timurlang, the Mongol ! In life they never met. There wasn't 
room enough for them at the same time on one earth. But I 
see them now, I swear to you; I see them, grim, fiendish, hob- 
nobbing and agreeing together in some hellish design. They 
only wait the ripe moment — when a million wraths, envies, lusts, 
greeds, shall combine, and a rebel soul, compacted of them all, 
shall cry out deep-lunged and desperate for a cause against you, 
which sha'n't be lacking, for they '11 invent it. And the grim 
five shall laugh, and seize upon mankind, and knead them to 
one mass, and toss them like a madness of fire, and harrass them 
as the wind does the many-waved ocean, so that it needs must 
rise, and engulf the whole world. 

Oh, father, while it is yet time, invoke the one great-hearted 
self-oblivious leader whom the earth ever knew. He alone can 
arise to make dutiful self-effacement glorious! And you have 
almost forgotten him. I call his name under breath — for he is 
always near us — and lo, he appears. Then the fiends chatter 
with fear, their hateful leers fade out, and they are gone ! 

(The horrible conquerors of the ancient world stand up together, 
clearly visible now to all, as ominous figures against the sTcy. 
Jackson gets ready to fight them, Jefferson draws bach, screening 
his eyes to study them the better, Lincoln steps forward, with an 
outstretched hand, as tho* he believed he could conciliate them, 
Benjamin Franklin tries to pull Lincoln bach, and beckons to 
all to look on Washington, who stands now in their midst. The 
five ancient scourges of the world seem curious rather than ter- 
rified, but during the ensuing description {which enacts itself) 
they a/re abashed and fade out)' 

VISION OP WASHINGTON 

Under an elm he took command. 

Under a spreading tree. 
As it lifted its boughs, so he lifted his hand 

To high heaven for liberty. 

96 



OLD WOBLD CONQUEBOES 

And he swore in silence the holy oath. 

His eyes in the living green : 
"To God we appeal by fearless growth, 

In faith and in hope serene. 

"Will she bud not again, if the winter strip 

Her leaves from the soaring bole? 
With close-set teeth, unqnivering lip. 

Let the body die for the soul ! 
In death we'll grapple for sterner hold. 

Fast-rooted in sacred earth; 
And the sap shall rise, and the buds unfold ; 

New multitudes dancing for mirth V 

magnanimous spirit, thy people fill. 

And incite them from height to height 
With thy clearness of vision, thy swiftness of will. 

With thy pride in the noble and right ! 
man sublime, wise and strong. 

Our patriot saint and sage, 
Of thy fortitude forge us a triumph-song 

With thy godlike battle-rage! 

UncIiE Sam (Recovering from his genuine amazement) — This 
is passing strange. Spook-raising done to "Old Glory'M Nor 
ever hitherto did he seem to stand before me with quite such 
overawing dignity. A wooden God, he? A pasteboard the- 
atrical property for a safe and sane Fourth-of-Jidy celebration? 
A fashion plate for a Colonial Dames' Ball. ISTot on my 
spangled banner! 

To bed, Jessie, and many thanks. Your dad's on to every 
trick of our enemies. The committee is positively chosen. All 
I've got to do is — well, to fortify them with a few parting in- 
junctions. 

97 



END OF SECTION SIX 



(Jessamine Magnolia seems to wake up suddenly as out of a trance. 

She holes startled from one member to the other of the 

Committee, hardly seeming to recognize them) 

Where am I? 

(She passes her hand over her forehead, utters a cry, turns and 

runs out, when the shade of George Washington, raised hy her 

visualizing imagination, fades away) 



98 



VII. 

UNCLE SAM'S PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 
TO HIS COMMITTEE 



VII. 

ITnci^ Sam — Gentlemen — If a girl in her powerful loyalty can 
body forth for us such a nightmare, what can't you do to the 
enemy ? 

Benjamin Franklin — That is, if they are imprudent enough and 
admit us to their confidence. 

Uncle Sam — ^As a last resort you could afflict them, I suppose, 
with an unpleasant visit of the Father of his country. Ifs our- 
selves encourage prophets of evil, and by our fear fulfil their 
predictions. Just suppose WE, you four and I, put our heads 
together, and dovetailed common sense, and got five minutes of 
genuine co-operative volition, co-ordinated imagination, simul- 
taneous intellection, and sympathetic co-emotion? Why, we'd 
make the mountains skip like unicorns and the seven seas purr 
like Daniel's lions, or coo like doves in a weeping willow. 

But there's been so far a terrible difficulty in the way of such 
a miracle of unanimity. I could never quite make up my mind 
as to whom I should trust. Besides, one can't from any single 
generation pick out mutually complementary leaders such as 
you, with your noble diversity in unity. What ? Shall I entrust 
life and death matters to supermen, who can't understand the 
common fry? Or shall I go fish up a dry creek for minnows? 
And some claim even they might grow up to be sharks in the 
day of inordinate prosperity. So, dragnet a puddle for poUy- 
wogs, that can only, at worst, become bull-frogs in some pool, or 
nab wigglers that develop to moonlight singers in young love's 
ear. That's had to be my policy. 

So I'll start my exhortation with a picturesque restatement 
of this initial difficulty. 

Oh, we've read of all the famous men 

Who made empires rise and fall, 
But we cursed them, as became us men. 

Who set freedom above all. 

101 



OUR UNCLE SAM'S 



Had the oak-tree, had the bay-tree aught 

In conunon with eominoii men ? 
There's fame for the private patriot — 

For the pure and hiunble — when? 

All who say a "nay'' and mean a "yes" 
Aren't statesmen but plain knaves! 

And your men of fatal genius ? 
They are safest in their graves! 

For, willy nilly, they monopolize 
What's the common people's right, 

And will raise up some new crop o' lies 
And abuses over night ! 

If you settle then down to little folk 
Whom you "safe and sane" surmise. 

And chop and lop and whittle folk 
To the right manageable size — 

From a skittle full of zeros scum 

Isn't skimmed, sir, very rich I 
Can my people's gods and heroes come 

From a gutter-puddle or ditch ? 

But if honor and privileged rank c'rrupt, say, 

And culture too and wealth — 
Why, Sam, methinks your public bankruptcy 

Is not creeping on by stealth. 

On the horns of a dilemma, son. 

We are caught, I greatly fear ! 
Could Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson 

With philosophy help us here? 

Say that one advertised extensively 

For a proper popular god, 
Critically, subtly, pensively 

To invoke and poke and prod ? 

102 



PAKTING INSTEUCTIONS 



Wouldn't we get a gay variety: 

A philanthropist with his wad, 
A brewer with a new brand of piety, 

A clodhopper with his clod ! 

Then, of course on the arrival of 
Every new-hatched batch sublime, 

We'd work the law of the survival of 
The fittest over time. 

When we'd chosen at last our favorite. 

Ask him how he dared expect 
Our endorsement, and what he gave for it — 

Till his name and frame are wrecked. 

When well dead, why, a marmoreal 

Or brazen monstrosity'U attest 
'Tisn't a man, but a memorial. 

Our good populace love best. 

Andrew Jackson — Samuel, if you've ever really been me, as you 
were polite enough to confess, you must know that a big fellow's 
more likely to play fair with you in the long run, even if he has 
his mad spells. 

Thomas Jefferson — ^I should think it was a question of being 
truly representative, when the genius cannot well fail of being 
beneficent. You should trust the humble man for what ser- 
vices his experience and training make it possible for him to 
render. But the educated, the peculiarly gifted, they should not 
be distrusted on principle. Sometimes they are even more sin- 
cerely democratic than the so-called men of the people. 

Abraham Lincoln — If s all in the man's heart, Sam. When we 
come to the great things, they level us up, you know, astonish- 
ingly; and the wren can ride on the eagle's back, if it comes to 
the worst. 

103 



OUR UNCLE SAM'S 



Benjamin Franklin — I should judge that men are never large 
enough for such a peculiar nation as yours. Don't fear, Sam, 
that any of us is so tall as to out-top your opportunity ! 

Uncle Sam — ^You don't then think democracy means, as I have 
been lately told again and again, a deliberate hypocritical cult of 
incompetency? You can't guess what good it does me to find 
you keep the old faith; for, at heart, I want to reverence some- 
thing — if I could only squarely meet it, man to man. 

Andrew Jackson — ^And bigger than yourself, Sam? Thafs 
where the rub comes in; for maybe you can't squeeze through a 
needle's eye, or see through the back of your own head. 

Uncle Sam — ^Would you insinuate that there have been greater — 
in the past ? That's not true. That shall be a lie, even if it isn't. 
Let's all deny it together. I've seen Babylon, and Egypt, and I 
wouldn't give a snap of my fingers for the likes of Greece and 
Rome. 

Abraham Lincoln — ^But what of a little gully between Carmel 
and Beersheba — ^toward Horeb, the reputed mount of God ? 

Uncle Sam — Thomas, help me in this matter. Abe has probed 
the sore spot. If I can't get a brand-new religion, I shall be in 
constant peril of just going round in the old treadmill. And 
I don't want to. At the peril of my immortal soul I wont. 

I tried lately to work up a compromise on a sort of new dy- 
namic thought, that affirms and denies by occult rules, and dem- 
onstrates the desirable, and derives the impossible by irrefragable 
logic from absolute premises. You have an affluent mind, and at 
once you are rich. You are well, you are happy, you love all 
mankind, everything's right off the bat coleur-de-rose and eau- 
de-cologne. You touch the button, and principle does it all up 
brown, and the stalactites and stalagmites in my Mammoth Cave 
just chew it up alive with dental stabs of light ! 

But I begin to feel already a wee bit as I did after my great 
Mormon spree. That did make a salt wilderness hump itself 
and burst into copper mines, so artesian wells spouted every rod 
or two. It worked wonders in the practical line. Brigham even, 

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and his numerous family, helped us to believe more firmly in 
this poor human nature : with such infinite possibilities of mur- 
der and arson, and divorce, and disinheritance — yet absolutely 
not a breath of scandal in his household ! So this latest patented 
affront of mine to the staid spiritual stick-at-homes and votaries 
of dignified tradition has done a hulking deal of good. But for 
aU that, it leaves me with a strange aching void in my loving 
heart. 

Thomas, Benny — Abe and Andrew of course majm't be able 
to understand it quite — I want, can you guess what? Fll teU 
you. I want my long delayed Religious Declaration of Inde- 
pendence ! Nothing less wiU serve. Sooner or later it has got 
to come. Then why not now? 

Thomas Jefferson — Thaf s a very audacious programme, al- 
though, as a private fancy, I cherished the like myself. In what 
terms should one draw up the document you propose, to make it 
generally acceptable? 

Uncle Sam — Why not just cut loose? 

Benjamin Feanklin — That's almost too easy to do, and then 
drift — onto who knows what shoals and rapids ! 

Uncle Sam — I don't mean it that way. Just start afresh, inno- 
cent and pert, as if nothing had ever happened to cloud our 
sunshine before. Here's my holy land. Who wants a nobler? 
Don't the heavens roll around here, and a sight more expansive 
than around Palestine? For the question resolves itself into 
another : "Who's really God ?" If He's everywhere, as the best 
authorities declare, wherever the soul is that worships — why not 
just house-move Him officially, bag and baggage, from that blood- 
soaked rag of desert to this wholesome virgin hemisphere ? He'd 
like it better, I'm positive, for at one stroke He'd get rid of so 
many inconvenient associations. We could assign Him the 
National Parks for playgrounds; and for a sanctuary — who ever 
dreamed such a glory as this mile-deep solid cleft of rainbows? 

Benjamin Franklin — I was always very careful not to break with 
the past too sharply. 

105 



OUR UNCLE SAM'S 



Andrew Jackson — Sure, you never can tell. Look at my case. 
Didn't I get old-time religion late in life, and white-hot at that? 

Uncle Sam — But if we'd had the new variety going, would not 
your patriotic heart have preferred climbing up golden stairs 
planned and erected by home talent ? Say, by our greatest Amer- 
ican architect — Thomas here? 

Benjamin Franklin — I'm not sure, Sam, that your proposal is 
spiritually prudent. Say your heart's old and out of repair. So 
you have it cut out, on the slim chance that one you have ex- 
tracted hot from a bull-calf will do your little job better. And 
maybe it doesn't exactly fit, and meanwhile you lose your con- 
trol of the vital machine. Have you animal spirits enough to 
spare for a protracted series of such operations? 

Uncle Sam — Good, Benny ! Heart-swapping's risky sport. But I 

don't quite think your figure fits our case. 
Benjamin Franklin — Do you dare to look at yourself in a magic 
looking-glass — ^that shows you the invisible, forgotten, sup- 
pressed, in yourself? 

Could you, for instance, absolutely accept your history, as it is, 
without decoration? Geography and climate too, as divinely 
ordained ? 

Your ethnography, your economic resources, as fatal? And 
you — ^to be just altogether only what they happen to dictate or 
suggest? Content not to impose on them an order derived by you 
from ancient experience ? Do you think you could long manage 
to stand all alone in a universe disinfected of every tender 
superstition ? 

Eemember, what we came by is our luck, and not our fault. 
But if you started to create your world anew from the founda- 
tions up, wouldn't you feel responsible for gravitation, evolu- 
tion, respiration, heart-action, digestion, and all the rest of it? 
You couldn't endure that yet, could you? 

Of course I believe if s just possible — in theory. You might 
go to work and train souls for generations, and devise a new 
organ, so to say, on which the spirit would have to play entirely 

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PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 



new music — revealing itself more stupendously, as our com- 
patriots hoped to do at Brook Farm; and may be then you could 
get a chord struck that would make the stars in heaven dance 
visibly about a golden throne. 

Uncle Sam — Thaf s it, Benny, in a-ring-a-round-a-rosie. You've 
got my idea exactly. 

Benjamin Feanklin — ^But that implies awful age-long social dis- 
cipline on a bare chance; and you're somewhat self-indulgent, 
aren't you? 

Uncle Sam — I'm downright sorry that's got to be put off again for 
a few more generations. Anyway, we can't make it available for 
the immediate solution of my present problem. We can't catch 
up all that Pandemoniimi into a great onward swirl? We can't 
start a vortex, and have it grow, till aU the things we desired 
come tilting and yodling to our centre from the uttermost reach- 
es of the infinite ? No, no, the more's the pity. I see — we've 
got to go about this, gentlemen, on ordinary business principles. 
Only common political or economic prizes can be offered for 
whole-hearted adliesion to my sovereign, native, singular, and 
collective cause and will ! So be it. You're probably right. But 
by aU the cow-parsley up and down the milky way, that does seem 
inordinately hard luck ! 

(Uncle Sam hangs his head in deep meditation) 

Now, isn't it odd 

That you can't have a God 

Brand-new of your own. 

To replace the outgrown? 

If He reaUy is living, 

All-loving, forgiving — 

Why not straightway start over. 

And set us in clover? 

Why not hand us a Bible 

That isn't a libel 

On all we adore? 

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OUR UNCLE SAM'S 



Good and true to the core. 
Fresh and simple and clear 
For the folks that are here — 
And not for a race 
That's long lost its place 
On the map! for folks 
You could bully, or coax 
To be decent, and hoax 
Into holiness ? 

Wait? 

Why, it's all but too late — 

If religion this minute 

Got new life put in it — 

For us workers and schemers, 

Inventors and dreamers. 

Politicians and scholars. 

And chasers of dollars; 

Lest we put our reliance 

In soidless science. 

In efficient appliance. 

And just cheapen to the vulgar — 

Or follow some promulger 

Of manias exotic — 

Ascetic or erotic! 

For a God of our own 

We cry, and we groan 

In secret, and search 

The whole earth ! But in church 

''Keep stilP they tell us, 

''Or the Old may be jealous 

And lay waste our age 

In a fatherly rage !" 

But I'd cry Him defiance 

And place my reliance 

In the New — if He'd come. 

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PARTING INSTRUCTIOISrS 



Are we deaf? Is He dumb? 

Are we blind ? In the dark 

Can we kindle no spark 

To reveal to our seeing 

One mite of His Being? 

We are ready and eager, 

And the fiends beleaguer 

The house of our faith. 

If Thou be no wraith. 

It is time Thou camest; 

With Thine eyes that Thou flamest 
And madest us glad 
Like idiots, or MAD ! 

Pardon me, gentlemen. I'm terribly disappointed. I sup- 
pose I must give it up for the present. But you might as well 
know how I feel way down in the unsoundable depths of me. 

{After a pause, ivliich none of his chosen men venture to intrude 
upon, he continues in an artificially cheerful tone) 

Well, gentlemen, to the matter in hand. We must dispense 
with supernatural assistance, for your kind of a foreign God, you 
dear deists, is from the nature of the case in favor of both parties 
to any controversy, from which he is so far removed as to be in- 
different: and yours — 'Andrew and Abe — I fear me he's sys- 
tematically for the underdog, provided said dog has no teeth left 
at all. So, in this case too, he'd be likely to elect a policy of 
strict neutrality, till the event showed us posthumously which 
side prevails. 

But don't you forget it. Apollo lost standing after the un- 
foreseen defeats of Xerxes ! The Greeks remembered the conduct 
of his Delphic oracle, and the old boy could get handsome statues 
in his honor, maybe, but mighty little honest respect. 

Andrew Jackson — Sam, I'm always for declaring martial law on 
the least pretext. 

109 



OUE UXCLE SAM'S 



Abjraham Lincoln — ^Fin for remembering that both sides have the 
same human nature to contend with, and the same right to the 
protection of our constitution. 

Thomas Jeffekson — I'm for a rapid, progressive extension of 
Liberty. The time should soon dawn when men's good will and 
behavior need not to be guaranteed by any coercive compact, 
much less by the exercise of armed force. 

Benjamin Franklin — For my part, Sam, I approve what each has 
said, with reference to his special view of the situation. But 
we must keep a strict lookout for the facts, lest we dress them 
up unawares to resemble familiar bygones, and don't rightly 
estimate their peculiar and unexperienced aspects. 

Martial law, for instance, administered by a truly large mind 
and heart, may be more democratic than the government of 
divided counsels, controlled by the most astute and divisive 
counsellor. 

Uncle Sam — So you are an unmitigated opportunist, first, last 
and all the time? Benjamin, I always knew I had been you 
before I was myself. I just wish though I hadn't forgot so much 
that I then knew, before I learned the little you don't happen 
to know. 

With your leave, I'll proceed now to outline our policy for 
your discretionary use. 

Noisy fools want an upset? It's because they have a griev- 
ance ? They don't get scope enough ? or they don't handle them- 
selves right? haven't learned the lines of least resistance leading 
to prosperity ? I^Tow, an upset, if you're not arrant, restless fools, 
means for you radicals a favorable set-up! What's now upside 
down will be necessarily bottom-side-up when you shall have 
done your work. Of course, you're satisfied that the bottom 
should be top; and I, for my part, suspect the top could stand 
being bottom most peculiarly well, for the little while it would 
have to be ; and if I'm wrong, why, I should say they would just 
prove they belonged where you had put them ! But the real dif- 
ficulty is not with the upset or the set-up — supposing you've got 

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PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 



a notion of the scheme yon want to put through ; 1^11 credit you 
radicals with that much. What's got to be considered carefully 
is the sure-enough, bound-to-materialize hack-set. It means de- 
struction of capital, stored-up energy, savings of life. It means 
the disruption of the order and of organized methods, so you've 
got to improvise and teach a new technic ! And meanwhile, 
more waste! 

Then, worse, you don't at all, my boys, because of this ma- 
terial loss become spiritual, you know — intellectual, esthetical, 
moral, religious. Dear me, no ! I've learned better. On the con- 
trary, you've got to make up for the losses you've sustained, and 
put on extra steam, and work in three shifts. It means slavery 
of the higher to the lower in a man. There can't be, in quite a*. 
while, any margin of leisure for meditation, for soul-floweringo- 
And maybe there comes unbeknownst another upset you've got no 
set-up for, and with heaven knows what extra lack-set! 

Now, without your upset and the consequent hack-^et bur 
present set-up is just about hard enough for a healthy develop- 
ment of Americanism. Wouldn't you say so yourselves? You 
grunt and groan as it is, quite sincerely enough. So, my radical 
friends, reflect! 

Of course, I can appreciate the service of agitators, who use 
the malcontents, the have-nots, to get improvements and reforms 
granted by the usually too insolent and grasping "haves" and 
"got-theres." But if your Coxey's armies were entirely success- 
ful, you'd inevitably lose your respective jobs— unless you could 
hire out to the vanquished and ousted; and I should say they 
might prefer leaders of a more kindred refinement, social 
subtlety and taste. You'd just be out of a job. That's all the 
good the upset would do your sort; so, gentlemen, leaders and 
agitators, now's the time not to press too hard, if you know what's 
good for your unique and precious selves. 

Now, when I come to reconsider my own set-up, well, 
I can't honestly find a fault with it. WE'VE got classes ? You 
don't like the upper crust? And you hate snobs? Then why 
are the lower levels so laterally subdivided? Striated and 

111 



OUR UNCLE iSAM'S 



stratified ad infinitum? My pie's like a skyscraper shortcake 
with always a crust on top of every lot of crushed berries ! My 
own scheme simply means: the order of classes is freely 
permeable. The partitions are like colanders. Anj'^one that's 
fine enough can wriggle up through the perforations, and be ac- 
cepted in the just superior level. Of course, if absolutely every- 
hody wriggled through, where would be the fun to the successful, 
and the proper rebuke to the left-behinds, who as you know 
merely go to breeding, and postpone promotion to the next gen- 
eration — by when every family rejoices in at least one wriggler, 
who won't recognize his relatives once duly promoted ! 

You complain the holes are too fine, or have got stopped up ? 

What comes too easy isn't appreciated. Give out honors free 
— and who wants them? Who grows fit for them? Don't you 
"have-nots'^ enjoy the cheering spectacle of the degenerates who 
came by everything easy ? Don't you see the top dies off quick ? 
And what do they die of? Having breakfast served on a gold 
platter before they've lifted their peepers at noon, by an ape-man 
who's worth a dozen of them fried on toast ! 

Oh, the curse at the bottom ? That reads : do your damndest, 
or die ! But then the curse at the top sounds : be a genius, a 
saint, a "damned-lucky" fellow or — ^rot ! Now which curse, think 
you, is the heavier in mortifying casualties ? The best man, you 
swear, comes from below stairs? Nine times in ten, at least? 
Necessity is the mother of invention? Despair is the father of 
heroism? Then why, in heaven's name, should we abolish the 
below-stairs, and rid ourselves prematurely of such wholesome 
necessity and despair? Perhaps we lack already some salutary 
pressure, so that the bottom isn't sending up lately to us any 
Tecumseh Jacksons or any railsplitting Abes ! 

And, that I'm right — don't you see how men born in ease 
make artificial hardships for themselves, take even in extreme 
cases vows of poverty, becoming social tramps, and amateur out- 
casts? Just in order to improve for their souls your much- 
despised situation ! Don't you suppose the men of pedigree, who 
have to eke out their self-respect by considerations of their in- 

112 



PARTING INSTRUCTIONS 



feriority to their forebears — whom they dress up to look bigger 
than life out of mistaken pride, don't you suppose that in their 
heart of hearts they envy your stalwart men of the people, of the 
swinging stride and insolent independence, who are ancestors, 
haven't made good yet, but are soon going to, and will then make 
all bolstered-up scarecrows look like what they are, in the pres- 
ence of some yet-to-be-begotten God-man ? 

Of course I grant you there's another side, and you your- 
selves yield reluctant evidence of it. You've got a deep instinct 
that some sorts of nobility, and fineness, and grandeur, and glad- 
ness, and delicacy of vision, and subtlety of intelligence, and 
divinity of will, are got only by the awful process of thinning 
for idiocy, depravity, frivolity, insanity, suicide, those poor 
victims of inherited wealth and privileged culture! The rich 
and successful, who don't rot away or die out, who don't leave 
all their estates in the female line — don't they as a matter of fact 
valiantly serve us all ? The criminal is socially useful, you claim, 
by giving us, through scandal and horror, a vivid new sense of 
virtue and decency? He suffers and dies that the next gener- 
ation may be more moral ? 

Now, if you saw to it that there weren't any born rich, how 
would we other folk (who make our own way or don't; who do 
aU we can to get pull and graft in a small and crooked style), 
how would we get even an idea of well-being, and comfort and 
leisure sumptuously used, of the pride of life, and the elegant 
vanity, and the delightful absurdity of high spirits? With our 
souls cramped by thrift, could we even imagine the handsome- 
ness of a right sort of waste, arrogant, reckless or absent-minded, 
indifferently natural, and gracefully elegant? 

How would we, aside from such a goal of desire, get the notion 
of the "gentleman" as such, to torture us in our rough and ready 
vulgarity, our ill-airease bumptiousness? You know what I 
mean. He might be possible with any pedigree, but he can't be 
without unearned wealth. A man, let us say, who at the right 
time got the right play for every incipient instinct, and matured 
a charm, a talent, an accomplishment, a knack, a grace and a 

113 



OUR UNCLE SAM'S 



suave, delicate, fragrant self -assurance, with a most disinterested 
uselessness that could at any time put itself to the lowliest 
uses, if the circumstances or the cruel pressure of an ideal de- 
manded it ? 

Then too, just as you get your ideas of place and station and 
of the highbred person, you also get from him and his set the 
notion of a truly human world! Beings who never have to do 
anjrthing, who freely will their own restraints, duties of honor, 
elegancies, fastidious avoidance and taboos, conspire to trans- 
late all the base needs of existence into fascinating occasions for 
a fine craft and skill, with frivolities redolent of poetry, with an 
astute insight into the subtler technique of life. They, you see, 
can alone abandon the common scale, and sing their little song, 
for an ear we haven't yet developed, out of sheer overtones. So 
they make us, spectators of their performances, which we can't 
hear at all, dream of a life that isn't yet possible even to them, 
and certainly not to you and me. By their spinning out of non- 
sense a world of charm, they justify human nature to us in the 
sweat and the grime, so that when struggling as oakroots with 
the rocky substratum, we scent the meadowsweet, hear afar off 
the flutter of the butterfly, and divine the windy waves of shim- 
mer over the horizon hills. 

You agree then that the useless turns out after due con- 
sideration to be useful, if it survives its doom of rust and rot, 
and becomes divine? Granting now, gentlemen, that all this is 
true (and you know there's something in it you can't down-and- 
out for the life of you '; you seekers of an upset for the sake of a 
set-up of your own — and defiers of an inevitable hack-set!) , I ask 
you in conclusion : Are you breeding the men to help you — and 
not help themselves first, last and all the time? Are the hun- 
griest usually they who serve everybody else first, and keep on, 
till every dish on the platter is empty, and then cook some more ? 
Of course, the men at the top now know how to serve disinterest- 
edly, or would soon learn when they were faced by necessity. 
But would you have them for the servants of the order they de- 
test and despise? And could you, whom they contemned, bring 

114 



PARTING INSTllUCTIOlSrS 



yourselves to entrust them with any power on your behalf ? and if 
not, wouldn't your set-up be just what youVe got now — when 
you crashed to the bottom again, after a reign of terror and an 
orgy of blood, and we were most of us where we'd been before, 
minus a quiet sense of being at home to stay ? 

Boys, if you want an upset for a set-up, go to breeding first 
the setters-up and holders-up, and holders-down and getters-on 
of the system. And until you've bred such plentifully, why, let 
good enough alone. That's my fatherly advice. 

To be sure I have my sweet, sentimental moods, myself, some- 
times, when I cry over the slum, and think I can make silk 
purses out of sow's ears, and real kohinoors out of factory soot ! 
I tell you, when all of us — mind you, all of us, not a majority, 
but a unanimous vote — want what every man professes; namely, 
the best good of every individual, compatible with the best good 
of us all as a whole, and vice versa, why, then, on my word and 
honor, I'll agree to call the rabbles' roar at high tide of fume 
and spume — not sputter and kettledrums, but the sure-enough 
authoritative voice of God ! 

Meanwhile, I propose to run my little farm myself. Whoever 
incarnates the mood of the hour is duty-bound to be a mono- 
crat, more or less, and carry through the behests of a kind Provi- 
dence, irrespective of bookish scruples. Witness my Thomas! 
And don't forget my Andrew! And my honest Abe too, he 
called it a measure of war, for benevolent purposes — to hasten 
the inevitable end of a fruitless struggle ! Observe that they just 
had to be tyrants, if they were to be efficient democrats. So, 
take note, gentlemen : the Prophet of Liberty gets to be on speak- 
ing terms with the despot ! It's a long way 'round, but extremes 
do meet. The humble Servant-of-the-people becomes the Man- 
on-horseback. But mind you, to all appearances only! For 
there's a difference, and there's a reason : and if s in the heart of 
Abe, and in the common sense of Benny, and in the stubborn con- 
science of Andrew, and it's in the practical imagination of 
Thomas. 

115 



END OF SECTION SEVEN 



So, gentlemen, my Committee enjoys my fullest confidence. 
And mudslinging wont win this campaign. I advise you to rea- 
son together, and keep cool, and mind your manners. 

Now I'm ready to send you to the front, my four standbys, 
to intrust you with the whole burden of my prescient soul ! But 
don't leave me just yet You can't negotiate with people ab- 
sorbed by a competitive contest in the art of heavy breathing. 
This canyon is full of terrible realizations of my most secret mis- 
givings. They're but phantoms of mighirhave-beens and may- 
be-yets ; but your company will cheer me to the davm. And then 
don't lef s indulge in pathetic farewells. Just slip away together 
or singly, and I'll try to endure your absence with characteristic 
fortitude and nonchalance. 



116 



VIII. 

THE MUSE OF HISTORY, INCOGNITO, AND 
HER PRESENT DAY PROTAGONIST 



VIII. 



(Uncle Sam suddenly takes notice of the pot on the tripod) 

Uncle Sam — ^Didn't I tell you? There's that pot boiling up. 
What do you suppose will come out of it? 

Benjamin Franklin — That would depend entirely on the in- 
gredients you put in. 

Andrew Jackson — I'm not worried about anything that's got to 
work itself up to such a heat before it can get into action. 

Thomas Jefferson — Anyway, we do not believe any more in a 
Noah's flood overwhelming the steadfast progress of humanity. 

Uncle Sam — ^Eight you are. There's never going to be any more 
Boman monopoly of this terrestrial melon, no more thirty or hun- 
dred year spats of the nations ; no more black death or dancing 
mania. It's the day of enlightenment, and ever-spreading benev- 
olence. The sleeping sickness knows its place in the tropics, 
and the bubonic goes begging for a rodent, and the yellow jack 
advertises for a carrier mosquito. 

Andrew Jackson^ — Are you sure all this improvement in exter- 
nals will help us so much, if our hearts are still unconverted, 
corrupt, and rebellious ? 

Uncle Sam — If you listen to the croakers, to Bunyan's muck- 
rakers ! When was there ever a day like this of mine, with all its 
shortcomings, one-tenth part so decent ? You know, Benny, how 
you told me to study history. I have, and made a discovery too. 

(Turning to the pot) 

Say, stop sputtering like a volcano ! 

History, Benny, shows herself liable to a bias from this pesti- 
lent human nature in readers. She has a queer preference for 
the memorable and picturesque : 

Whenever your roadway's rutty or briery 

It gets jotted at once in your muse's diary; 

When roads are steam-rollered and oiled, a high average 

Has no interest as news in a high-spiced palaver age. 

119 



THE MUSE OF HISTORY 



{From the pot there suddenly leaps a ridiculous -figure of an old 
crone, and she draws out of the pot a screen much larger than it, 
and various puppets and costumes) 

Muse of Histoey — And who might you be, who know so much of 
history ? 

Uncle Sam {Turning to the heldaw.e) — -And who might you be, 
my good woman, who hop in so unseemly a guise into the re- 
spected presence of my company? 

Muse of History — them, I know very well; entitled too good, 
I fear, for your present mood. They'd better not witness our 
interview. 

Uncle Sam — .What I can stand, they can. I ask you again, who 
do you think you are, for I have my doubt that you're sane. 

Muse of History — I'm the Muse of History. 

Uncle Sam {Laughing and winking at his friends, as if to in- 
dulge a poor lunatic in her erroneous fancy) — I was just allud- 
ing, madame, to your foibles. But you see it isn't reasonable to 
expect that I should recognize so great a notability in such togs ! 

Muse of History — Had no choice. Where could I secure a classi- 
cal outfit, when I'm tossed out of your melting pot? 

Uncle Sam — ^Ha, ha, so you just boiled over, while I wasn't 
watching? 

Muse of History — I'm not scum, sir, I'm a mighty sputter from 
the bottom. 

Uncle Sam — Of course the flower of the dregs. I'm glad you go 
in for dress reform, and not the sun-bath cure. Wants egregious 
beauty to make that safe. And a rag carpet at least is some pro- 
tection to the public. 

Muse of History — I'm travelling incog. 

Uncle Sam — 'Good discipline. Takes the conceit out of a brass 
monkey. 

Muse of History — I'm not without my credentials. 

120 



AND HER PROTAGONIST 



Uncle Sam — I should hope not. And what might then be your 
line of goods? 

Muse of History — "Critical moments illustrated/' ^^eacon lights 
on the freedom of the seas." "Statesmen's ready relief." "Sta- 
tistics made plain and veracious." "Thirty-thousand anecdotes 
— a triple entente." "Handy reprints of prehistoric menus for 
research workers." 

Uncle Sam — -You haven't all that hid about your person? 

Muse of History — Thaf s the beauty of our scheme : just sign one 
of my red and white and blue blanks — the flag in one corner — 
George Washington in the other — and a dime a week. 

Uncle Sam — For eternity, even if you're damned. 

Muse of History — No, only for your natural life. We assume 
all mortality risks. And you see the effect is magical and im- 
mediate. Absolutely no pains taken. At once you can belong 
to a dozen select anti-fat associations, join a score of national 
mahogany clubs for settling cosmic evolution with oratory and 
terpsichorean novelties. You can know the world of which you 
are so distinguished a denizen, as vouched by your brain measure- 
ments registered ui Who's Who and Bluebooks and Bradstreet; 
and incidentally manage large charities and crafts and reforma- 
tories, and keep on speaking and hearing terms with your family 
by the aid of the graphophone. And, nevertheless, in six weeks 
at most, you can be perfectly competent, and equipped for a 
foreign embassy, a cabinet position, or, at a pinch, for the su- 
preme magistracy of this Democratic land, if you should suddenly 
be called upon to make that pathetic sacrifice of your private 
tastes to the interests and trusts. 

Uncle Sam — I never buy what I can pay for. On your lines I'm 
bomb-proofed and cyclone-ceUared. And you know I don't 
read. 

Muse of History — That's why, you see, all the time I was ex- 
plaining our original methods, I slapped up this little collapsible 
apparatus quick, that all came handily out of my private crazy- 

121 



THE MUSE OF HISTORY 



quilt carryall. That's the way we come to the rescue of the na- 
tive illiterate adult. You love a show, I don't doubt? 

Uncle Sam (Good-humoredly) — Provided I'm not in for it, and 
it's strictly neutral. 

Muse of History — Oh, to be sure, so you can tote water on both 
shoulders, and trade at inflated prices with both commisariats. 

Uncue Sam — ^It's undiplomatic to slander a possible customer's 
inherited policies. I was warned in my youth against tangle- 
foot alliances. Rooting on the international bleachers is more 
sport, Sammy, my boy — said Old Father 'William to me when he 
ducked me in the mill race — than risking your hide and your 
reputation in the game. So keep cool in the heat of the con- 
flict, and 

Whenever you can 

Be a fan. 

My man. 

And clap, and hoot 

And stamp and toot, 

And whale with your cane 

The safe and the sane, 

And toss up your hat. 

And scat the cat — 

For it's far the riskier plan, 

My man. 

And what might be the name of your prospective torture 
imposed on us for our soul's health gratis? 

Muse of History — The best 

Of the past. 
Recast 
By request. 

Uncle Sam — ^We're game, but mind you, you can't teach us any- 
thing. All the pasf s good for, nowadays, that it's quite passe 
is to furnish students of human nature with snakes in alcohol — 

122 



AND HEE PEG TAG ONI ST 



and ancestral names (certified off tombstones hopelessly out 
of plumb) smuggled in by nabobs and snobs. 

Muse of History — But you forget, Sam (for you see, I know it's 
you and what's the use of my disguising your identity any 
longer?) one never can tell: — 

I have a way, 
So they say, 

Of repeating myself inconveniently. 
Ears and eyes 
Make you wise. 

If you bear with my weaknesses leniently. 

For the truth 
In my booth 

With puppet and periwigged phantom I'm 
To sketch. 
And to fetch 

You with choice elocution and pantomime ! 

First, let me commend my protagonist, and bid you guess 
his name from my description : A sworn patriot, like Hannibal, 
he had a bloodscore to settle : the great criminal — Napoleon — and 
Louis XIV. before him. Like Alaric, he knew discipline and 
revered authority, and preferred to fight even against Caesar 
in Caesar's name. Like Attila, he scorned rest and invoked 
the cynical demon. Like Jenghis Khan he projected dominion — 
but not for himself, and nobler therein. Like Timurlang he 
will haunt the spiritual squalor and sordid wealth of generations 
that knew him not — with a sense of the sublime. His was stu- 
pendous energy; will, unflinching; cunning, resourceful and 
subtle. His next of kin were the cyclone and the volcano. Thor, 
whose hammer felled the giants; Odin, the single-eyed, whose 
spear decreed peace and war ; Zeus, who read in the book of fate, 
were eaglets hatched earlier in the same eyrie as he ! 

Lion and fox in one, a monster and yet seeming natural and 
genial; a gryphon, a gargoyle, the creation larger than life of 

123 



THE MUSE OF HISTORY 



the grotesque genius of the race in a moment of grimness and 
high spirits! No scruples deflected his direct efficiency. Not 
squeamish as to means, he forged to the God-appointed end. A 
Macchiavelli who eompanied with Luther and Kant; a cham- 
pion of the fierce gods against a sinister tidal wave of chaos 
and darkness ; a Mohawk on the warpath ; a Caesar Borgia with- 
out private vice. 

Such, I tell you, was he, and more, tho' all was repressed, 
constrained — to rule the modern world. Let a braver judge him, 
an honester, a more disinterested — tho' he donned the livery of 
Satan! And the earth will groan and raven for greatness of 
thew and heart for many an age, ere she shall thrill to greet 
such another stalwart son of her giant youth ! 

Have you guessed whom I mean? 

Uncle Sam — ^Can^t imagine. Haven't seen such a horntoad in 
Texas. Would lock him. up, if he wriggled. No room for him, 
I guess, outside the padded cell or the electric chair — unless 
stuffed, or in alcohol. 

Muse of History — Just the same he was worth snapshooting in 
his jungle habitat and tracking to his lair. The greatest slayer 
of the bluedevils he, hurling at them the big-bellied butt ! How 
his oaths pounded the table as the golden blood foamed and 
flowed in cataracts of roistering good-fellowship! Twenty-eight 
encounters, dragon vs. dragon, in honor of the lunar period; 
and woe to what braggart soever bearded in effigy his smooth- 
shaven foursquare jaw ! Who like him could bid an anecdote in 
grotesque motley caper and handspring to riotous roars ? 

Ever was he the same daredevil upholder of vested interests ! 
"Long live privilege, prerogative, arrogant assumption, success- 
ful usurpation, and the autocratic right divine !" As for the silly 
burghers — not gentle-born — they dreaded his wild practical 
jokes and insolent pranks, and nicknamed him the mad squire. 
Mad, yet with a method; for his ancestral lands — paid. "To 
the devil with the proletariat!" — by the way of golden profits 
to the Lord of the Manor ! 

124 



AND HER PROTAGONIST 



Do you know my big-bra wned bully yet ? 
TJncle Sam— -Should think him fetched out of the rag-bag or the 
junk-pile of the Dark Ages. Might have posed for a prehistoric 
ancestor of my much esteemed friend. Baron Steuben. 

Muse of History — You're on the trail of his lineage anyway, 
Sam, if you've crisscrossed the generations a bit. He had a 
genius that paralyzed opposition. At a glance he shot to the 
live centre of any debate a shattering bolt of certainty. With 
wild-beast tenacity he kept his grip on the bleeding issue. He 
watched Luck at her deal, and read the trumps up every player's 
sleeve. With alternate courses of policy, thought out to de- 
tails, foreordered in untrammeled execution — he leaped into the 
thick of hostile choices and chances. His God was success, the 
success of his caste first; then of his country for his caste; and 
he was super stitiously precise in the ritual of his God's worship. 
He never threatened, never dared either one whit more or 
less than his utmost accurately reckoned strength would war- 
rant. When he smote the stroke was exact, fatal, damning, 
punctiliously, ridiculously adequate. In triumph he was 
moderate, impartial, no grabber of honors, no coveter of harems, 
no plotter of a dynastic honor for himself. A monopolizer only 
of his patent blend of finesse and brutality, at the beck of his 
atheist's God. 

Uncle Sam — It's a Wagnerian super-Hagen up-to-date you are 
faking to strut in melodrama and curdle the blood of English 
sparrows ! Hugo invented him to keep up the war of the worlds, 
after he got the devil to sniffing over his Les MiserMes, and rec- 
onciled him to the good and kind God ! 

Muse op History — ^You aren't such a bad critic of fiction, Sam. 
But you aren't a connoisseur in the facts of history. The chap's 
real and alive, and he had a poetic afflatus, would blurt itself 
out in grim paradoxes and scorching metaphors, that realized 
prophecy for him, enforced a regime, and disinfected his fellows 
of any refinement, delicacy, piety, or conscientious hesi- 

. tancy, that might hinder; while they smothered in contempt 

135 



THE MUSE OF HISTORY 



what he shoved aside or overthrew, barbing his scourge with 
peasant saws ! "The curry-comb/' "blood and iron," the "mailed 
fist,'' the "shining armor," the "scrap of paper," the "spiked 
helmet," the "spurred boot," the "stamp of the heavy heel," 
^Hbleeding the enemy white," one's right to "wring the necks of 
chickens one's hatched," "grandees that had hot water in the pot 
and set out their steaming platters on the board." So he crashed 
and swept the tables with a catchword, a watchword, a forward- 
march for the God Mavors of a reborn Barbarian Rome ! Do you 
recognize the original of my portrait? "Bite-the-Marrow," the 
great and the only — >Loyal servant — and promoter of "High 
taxes"! 

And he's a reality, no invention of mine, the mere's the pity 
for you, 'Sam ; and ''Honi soit qui mal y pense/* say I ; for he 
glares to-day larger than life across the seas; six feet two, vast 
build; massive, clear, firm granite coimtenance, bulging four- 
square; large, clear, grey, fulminant, inscrutable eyes! Can you 
see him glare? 

Uncle Sam — Ay, ay, at Johnnie Bull, or maybe at Johnnie 
Crapaud. And much good may it do them and him at their af- 
ternoon tea. For, in the end, sure as life, I'll get appointed re- 
ceiver of a bankrupt Europe & Co. — and then just watch me 
transfer the securities where they'U do the most good to 
downtrodden humanity! 

Muse of History — Just so. Uncle Sam; but first you must con- 
quer him. He's more than a man; he's a principle. Even if he 
challenges you to mortal combat, he'll arrogate to himself the 
choice of the weapons and dictate the time and place. That's 
his way. He's a Colossus of Rhodes, and bestrides the Channel 
already, and ere you know — the Atlantic will be his gold-fish 
bowl for submarines. 

His creed, you see in his historic incarnation, was simple. 
"Absurd?" you say? Well, so be it, but none the less credible, 
and all the more contagious! "My class first in Prussia; 
Prussia first in Germany ; Germany first in the world ; My King 

126 



AND HER PROTAGONIST 



supreme as Kaiser!^' and, for his private satisfaction, he added 
some secret clauses : the power behind the throne — the keeper of 
the x4.ugiist Conscience — myself, Bite-the-Marrow ; and my suc- 
cessors in the chancellorship — always the genius of each gen- 
eration ! When he deemed it expedient, he could make his life 
and death-convictions seem purely chimerical delusions of his 
enemies, and laugh them out of court with unaffected Homeric 
geniality. 

Enter Bite-the-Marrow, look out, Sam! 



127 



IX. 

BITE-THE-MARROW AND THE VIOLATED 
CONSTITUTION 



IX. 

Scene I. of the Bismarck Puppet Show 

Bismarck — ^Sire, eight long years among the ambassadors of the 
German states, under the arrogant sway of Austria, have fully 
convinced me of Prussia's divine destiny. 

William I. — But runs not a wise saw : Fortiter in re, suaviter in 
modof 

Bismarck — Ay, when I took it upon myself to light my cigar in 
full meeting at the Austrian president's own, then it was, I broke 
up his arrogant monopoly, and not by any courteous pro- 
testations. 

William I. — That was indeed cogent reasoning. But while I 
heed not your enemies, which are mine also, we may sometimes 
learn from them. They complain of brow-beating, studied in- 
solence, cynical brutality, biting sarcasms, provocative ironic 
serenity. 

Bismarck — ^Was I summoned to my post of danger to deal out 
holiday compliments all around? Or was it only when I vowed 
to establish the royal prerogative and prestige in the teeth of an 
overwhelming majority, that your gracious majesty consented to 
tear up your abdication? 

William I. — I appreciate your extraordinary difficulties. But 
may there not be in the very manner of our proposed military re- 
forms — doubling out of hand the standing army — an unneces- 
sary challenge to the conservatives, our natural friends, as well 
as to our opponents, the liberals ? Might we not resort to meas- 
ures of gradual expansion, and to more conciliatory methods? 

Bismarck — I am deeply indebted, your majesty, for this rare op- 
portunity to defend myself. I hate no man for any ill he may 
have thought, or willed, or done to me in my private capacity. 
The strong bears not malice. He ignores wrongs, biding his 
time to make friends, or he more than evens the score ! But the 
enemies of the State ? That is different. They are the enemies of 
God. Toward them magnanimity were treason. Are they not 

131 



BITE-THE- MARROW AND 



already numerous enough ? Do they need encouragement ? i.\nd 
shall the crown's champion seem afraid of the worst that man 
can do to him? 

The more violent the excitement about me, the more it be- 
hooves your servant to keep a cool head, clear vision, and his 
speech direct, that it may not arouse questioning; or if speech 
could not but betray secrets, what is left your servant but 
an apparently contemptuous silence calculated to mislead by am- 
biguity? Am I a Frenchman or an Italian, that I am accused 
of dissimulation? Am I not German, ay, and more — ^Prussian? 
Spoke I not Lettish in childhood, the tongue of our barbarous 
forebears — that hated a lie worse than death ? 

But, your majesty, I learned long since that among diplo- 
matic deceivers and trimmers, official self-seekers and hypocrites, 
the truth is so rare, one may without a blush at any time hazard 
it naked. As no one will believe that I am so simple a child as 
to speak my mind, my worst enemy is surest to think I mean the 
opposite. Afterwards he has only his own stupidity to resent. 
Alas, it cannot be otherwise ! I must be execrated, decried as a 
traitor, the archfiend, a very Cataline. But with such insults I 
nourish my pride. Some day the curs will whine and lick my 
boots. 

William I. — ^When, however, you think the interests of the coun- 
try jeopardized, and you move on remorselessly, could you not 
take partly into your confidence the well-meaning among the 
leaders ? 

Bismarck — How long would they continue well meaning? The 
world cannot be trusted with our secrets. It must suppose our 
policy of army increase due to revolutionary unrest, and intend- 
ed for domestic repression, to crush out what they are pleased to 
call 'liberal aspirations" ! And if that is to be the foreign opin- 
ion, must it not also be the general opinion at home ? 

William I. — Ah, but in a sense, are not their fears right? Need 
we go to such lengths in establishing the authority of the throne ? 

132 



THE CONSTITUTION 



BisiiiARCK — Alas! we have no other course. We must propose 
nothing less than, by discipline and special education, to make 
machines of men in the service of the state, for the prompt 
execution of the decrees of Providence revealed to us. 

How else shall we save Prussia, and unify Germany? 

William I. — Methinks it is just here one may cherish a doubt, lest 
we extinguish that noble fire the German spirit kindled — the 
right of private judgment, and our freedom of conscience won 
with the shedding of so much blood. 

Bismarck — Nay, we shall not rob any man of his private judg- 
ment, so we predetermine his public conduct by well-established 
habits and discipline. His conscience shall continue free, but we 
will take care to foreordain his preferences. In relation to the 
world of spirit, he shall in his innermost self stand unassailed, 
nay, fortified the rather. 

Fear not, sire. What your subjects may seem to forfeit in the 
w^ay of a superficial contemptible personal liberty, they will much 
more than make good in a passionate, great-souled pride, shar- 
ing the moral grandeur of their august sovereign. 

William I. — ^With your patriotic policy I am in accord ; but I do 
not, as you, see that Prussia is surrounded with malice and wick- 
edness on all sides; that every diplomatic move of our rival is 
a cunning contrivance to undermine us. He may perchance be 
won by trust and graciousness. The experiment at least does 
still seem worth the trying. Think how much happier we should 
be were our policy as clear, honest and open as it is beneficent. 

Bismarck— Later we may inaugurate a regime of universal good 
will when we are admittedly supreme. Your majesty forgets 
that the enemy must at present underestimate and despise us, 
if with superior resources he is not to compass his evil designs. 
We must be prepared for the unforeseen which he will let loose 
upon us, and he shall not dream that we foresaw! Then shall 
the aggressor turn out the dupe of his own arrogancy ! Nor dare 
the statesman indulge in too scrupulous and tender a conscience. 

133 



BITE-THE- MARROW AND 



Public weal is not attained by the same rules that govern private 
good. 

Was it not in profound peace, and without losing time to 
create a plausible pretext, that the great Frederick seized upon 
Silesia, fulfilling so the manifest destiny of that province, and 
rounding out strategically and economically his dominions for 
better self-defence ? Seven years he fought, when kings and em- 
perors in fond and futile chivalry came to the help of the angry 
Austrian empress! So he defended valiantly his God-given 
heritage. 

- Did he not, after, silence Austria and Russia forever, making 
them overtly accept his principle: namely, the national aggran- 
dizement of the state to readily defensible frontiers, when he 
shared with them the spoils of that ever turbulent neighbor, the 
republican kingdom, the aristocratic republic of Poland, which 
had so long been a perpetual menace to the peaceful continuance 
of a rational benevolent despotism across her frontiers ? 

So it was, and only so, boldly, remorselessly, that the great 
Frederick cemented a military monarchy, and bequeathed to his 
successors a policy they dare not alter, the essence of which may 
be stated: German unity shall have one day in Prussia the 
strong champion so great a cause requires! And if, in idyllic 
mood, one objects to the military aspect of the monarchy — how 
else than by the help of a people of soldiers may Germany come 
into her own? God forefend that Europe be destined (as the 
Corsican cynically declared) to be one day all Cossack, or all 
French ! 

Now shall the peerless Frederick be summoned at the bar of 
Bourgeois morality to answer for his royal conduct, because his 
mighty hand incorporated benevolently into Prussia the prov- 
ince essential to her unity, her service to Germany, and some 
day, God knows, to Europe ? 

William I. — True, our ancestor was governed by a higher code 
than that of ordinary men. Yet have not the times undergone 
such changes, that we can hope in the near future to found the 

134 



THE CONSTITUTION 



throne on the devotions of a grateful people? Was it not Stein, 
a liberal statesman, who healed the wounds inflicted by seven 
years of inevitable war? 

Bismarck — Stein truly administered first-aid-to-the-injured. He 
domesticated, ay, but he wisely also emasculated democracy. 
Such a liberal as he was, under like circumstances, I should 
gladly myself become. He re-established finances by a strict 
accountability of officers and the elimination of sinecures. He 
abolished serfdom and made ciphers into citizens, not so much 
surely out of sentimental S3rmpathy with them, as to raise up a 
new peasantry from which he might recruit larger armies, and a 
new bod}^ of burghers who would have a stake in the state. The 
land he freed from obsolete restrictions, and even opened state- 
offices and military careers to other than nobles, so as to keep 
the upper classes alert and upright by fear of a shameing com- 
petition, and recruit to them the highly gifted who chanced to 
be born among the less privileged. He taxed the nobles, not so 
much that the strong should bear, as may seem at first sight de- 
fensible, greater burdens, but that they should realize their sub- 
jection to the King, and that the common people should not be 
roused by apparent injustice to what might, at a critical time, 
prove a dangerous resentment. All this, in guise of liberalizing, 
did truly but consolidate the central power. 

Now do we to-day need to get power from the people? We 
see to it that the people's will flows ever in prearranged channels ! 
Constitutional government? It is chiefly a new weapon in the 
hands of the prudent monarch with which to quell irresponsible 
agitators ! 

William I. — Yet is there not something more in democracy? In 
the wars of Liberation, it was Scharnhorst's "people's army" that 
won back the independence of Prussia. 

Bismarck — Exactly, your majesty. And what does our famous 
tyrannical militarism signify, if not an extension of that sys- 
tem from times of distress to times of threatened peace? There 
shall be a wider, yea twice as wide a participation by the people 
in the glory of serving the state ! And that forsooth is tyranny ? 

135 



BITE-THE-M ARROW AND 



William I. — ^Your interpretations of our national life are indeed 
most enlightening, and bring us encouragement. But my son is 
a diligent student of history, a keen observer, and a soldier. Now 
he implores me that we move with extreme caution. He refers 
back to the Long Parliament and Cromwell ! 

Bismarck — ^Yet note, sire, the differences in the situation. I 
serve no Stuart, not even a Tudor, but a Hohenzollern. We 
deal not with a selfish, anarchistic people, like the English. Our 
people are, thank God, more or less one-minded, stolid and me- 
chanical. They need to have a standard set them, if they are to 
attain to their uniform best. Their genius appears in unques- 
tioning obedience to one single gTeat purpose of their superiors. 
Schamhorst's national army further extended to its logical 
limit, merely extends to every able-bodied man the pride and 
power of self-identification with the sovereign will. Ah, what 
could be more liberalizing, ennobling, ay, in a very true sense 
democratizing, than this: One King, one people? 

Think me not, in my enthusiasm, ignorant of all that men 
say. I learned to handle politicians by driving my cattle to 
market; to conciliate my fellows, caressing and booting alter- 
nately my mastiffs. Ah, I shall be hated as never any before 
me, but men shall gnash their teeth impotently, resorting in vain 
to public enemy and private assassin. 

When the press ventures to foment discontent and rebellion, 
I shall clap tight a muzzle on it. WTiere I can't penalize, I can 
subsidize, and win over friends to the righteous cause. Shall I 
stop now at anything? 

In any event, at the worst, death on the scaffold, sire, is as 
honorable in your service as death on the. field of battle. 

William I. — Thou still f orgettest Charles ? 

Bismarck — Nay, sire. But I shall at least, like Strafford, pre- 
cede the King and give him timely warning. 

AYiLLiAM I. — But the constitution we violate ? 

Bismarck — The constitution should serve the King, not the King 
the constitution ! 



136 



THE CONSTITUTION 



We shall dissolve the Chambers as often as they care to make 
it necessary. The King shall declare that as the Three Estates 
cannot agree, he will notwithstanding discharge his solemn and 
sacred dnty by Prussia, without regard to scraps of paper. 

William I. — It is terrible, but you are right! I see the manifest 
finger of God in it all. Yet mind you, no war; above all, no 
provocation ! 

Bismarck — It is to prevent such we labor. Not even against an 
act of God shall the King be unprepared. Forewarned is fore- 
armed. Let the enemy beware how he assails us — unawares! 

William I. — ^Having interrogated my faithful minister most 
freely, and content with what he has replied, I pledge him 
loyally my endorsement, even to the uttermost. 

(The King greets Bismarclc quietly, and starts to withdraw) 

BiSMAECK — My grateful tjianks. I shall defy sullen looks, gloomy 
scowls, the murderer's thrust or bullet, the momentary threat of 
revolution, with a glad heart, a composed spirit! All that we 
do for the people's defence, against the wiU of them that arro- 
gate the right to speak on their behalf, will be approved by his- 
tory. As thy loyal minister, I shall have my exalted station at 
the foot of thy throne. 

(Exit the King, deeply agitated, hut resolute) 

Bismarck (alone) — ^Good, over-scrupulous, kind-hearted man. 
Brave, but narrow; honest, but short-sighted; yet true, true to 
the core. Providence hatli been kind indeed to me. Never stood 
a man so ready to accomplish what shall forever endure to praise 
his memory. We shall with such a sovereign unite Germany un- 
der one sceptre. And it shall not be an elective honor, like that 
I bade his brother reject; but one of divine right. And all 
Europe shall yet rejoice as the footstool of the Prussian throne, 
when Germany undertakes her inevitable destiny, and re- 
generates the human race ! 



137 



THE "DOCTORED" TELEGRAM, OR 
MILITARY NECESSITY 



X. 

/Scene II. of the Bismarck Puppet Show 

{Bismarck enters left with telegram in hand. To the extreme 
right are seated at their heer Helmuth Karl Bernhardt von 
Molthe and Alhrecht Theodor Emil von Boon) 

Bismarck — Clearly, the critical hour has struck; as my folk-wis- 
dom has it, the pear is ripe ! They have come at my invitation. 
I shall try them first, ere I reveal my entire purpose to those 
whole-hearted servants of the thick-headed God Mavors. 

{He approaches with slow step to the table, a strangely sphynx- 
like expression on his massive countenance. The two men 
glance at each other inquiringly and are about to rise) 

Von Eoon — Does your summons to await you here and your 
solemn manner portend unforseen misfortune? 

Von Moltkb — Does the telegram you hold bring bad news ? 

{Bismarck folds it up carefully, with a quiet, quizzical satis- 
faction) 

Bismarck — No ceremony, my honored guests. As for the news, 
it's the best — or the worst, according to our point of view. 

Von Moltke — ^You have then resolutely clapped your spurs into 
the flanks of your war-horse, the inevitable? 

Bismarck — I'm sorry you have forgotten my dictum: "The per- 
sonal conviction of a ruler, however well founded, that war will 
eventually break out, cannot warrant its promotion." 

Von Moltkb {groaning impatiently) — I often wish this respect- 
able Prussia of ours were Turkey, with a Muslim fanatic for 
Sultan, so that we needn't scruple to bring about some magnifi- 
cently useful "act of God" in the nick of time. 

Bismarck {smiling with affected horror) — How easily we Teutons 
orientalize ! Shocking sentiment for a Christian soldier. 

Von Moltke — I'm frank to say it doesn't seem shocking to me. 
What are we three for ? Boon's to work out perfect army-reform. 
I'm to adapt our strategy, without the enemy's knowledge, to 

141 



THE DOCTORED TELEGR'AM 

modern armament and means of transportation. And your 
noble office? What is it, but to pull the wires judiciously be- 
hind Jupiter Tonans? 

Bismarck — ^You flatter me, my dear Helmuth — ^not so named 
for naught. Ay, ay, both courage and light ! But suppose, good 
friend, your God of the thunderbolts has an inkling of his own 
time ; and it were instead our part to read his sovereign mind a 
little in advance of the duller or less attentive, and possess mean- 
while our souls in patience ? 

Von Roon — Oh, we've gone over our history ad nauseam. 

Voisr MoLTKE — The general staff have forseen every possible cam- 
paign. I should think by this the army were ready to show 
whether its teeth are false ! 

Bismarck {laughing good-naturedly) — Friends, good friends, it's 
feeding time in the carnivora section of the patriotic zoo. 

Von- Roon — One has a right to do a little roaring in private when 
one suifers for years under this policy of public self-restraint. 
Year in, year out, what were we but puppets on which raw 
politicians at the county-fair did target-practice? 

Bismarck — But haven't we since been rewarded with a fat pop- 
ularity? Ah, we two (to Molthe) we're not like you, you man 
of gold, pure gold — advertising in vain for a private enemy I 

VoN" Moltke — My task was easier, I suppose, just to fight — not 
enemies but rust and rot? I'm sick even now of furbishing and 
polishing up the equipment. 

Von Roon — Leaving out personal zeal, I protest what is ex- 
pedient for the state is lawful to her ministers, so soon as they 
have made it legal ; and now, when there is no parliamentary op- 
position, why any longer delay? 

Bismarck — Luckily army-reform and geography are your 
specialty, you bom Prussian; as for you, the '^tall and tanned," 
the "hard and grand" — ^the "taciturn in seven languages," if you 
were a Dane in your youth 

143 



OR MILITARY NECESSITY 

Von Moltke (hrealcs in with some heat) — ^I say, that^s not fair. 
Can a man help his father taking him abroad when he's five? 
Mine was merely the case of a Mecklenburger spying out Hol- 
stein for Prussia. 

Bismarck — True, we should have annexed the island to the main- 
land sooner if you had been entrusted with the campaign from 
the start. And who caught the rat in his own hole ? 

Von Moltke — ^But I want my daily bread. Yesterday's is stale. 

Von Roon — Oh, yes, it's all very fine assuaging our patriotic rage 
with complimentary reminiscences. We want immediate leave to 
translate ideas into the language of hard fact. Why don't you 
convince the King with another threat of resignation? Thafs 
always effective. 

Bismarck — Perhaps we haven't been remiss. But only the logic 
of events convinces the people at large. 

Von Roon — The people ! One gives them orders ! And besides one 
may direct and hasten your kind of logic ! 

Von Moltke — lAnd we know you were a past master not so long 
ago of that sort of resignation to the will of Allah ! 

Von Roon — Yes, hear us out for once ! What else did you sum- 
mon us for? We appeal to your conscience. Didn't you help 
make the Schleswig-Holstein tangle so much more intricate, 
that everybody saw at a glance it had to be cut by the sword? 
And all the time you were really scheming and contriving to 
bridge over once for all the gap created by history between South 
and North, by bringing about and organizing that joint national 
war against the Dane. You admit your intimate part in aU this 
objective logic of events? 

Then didn't you astutely arrange a partnership between Prus- 
sia and our jealous enemy for the administration of our jointly 
captured provinces? So we showed good will in the sight of all 
men, and of course we couldn't help that purely geographic God- 
ordained advantage — the special nearness of said provinces to 
Prussia? Nor could we help Austria working herself up into 
an unseemly fury against us over it? And all men beheld our 

143 



THE DOCTORED TELEGRAM 

patience, until self-respect demanded that, at the opportune 
moment, when Austria suspected nothing, we should resent the 
intolerable insults you had so subtly invited? 

My God, and you dare talk to us, your fellow-workers, about 
Logic of Events? 

Then, pray, do you think us dunces? After Konigratz — 
Sadowa, the enemy calls it, for his pride couldn't bear to give 
his defeat the same name we gave it as our victory! — do you 
think we can't now see why you stood out against us all from 
the King down — with only the good Fritz on your side — and 
wouldn't let us bite off a big hunk of Bohemia, and blocked stub- 
bornly our triumphant march on Vienna? Ha, ha, we were not 
so to humble Austria's pride, or inflict incurable wounds, lest 
perchance we should be let and hindered by her resentment 
from soon settling our little score with a greater Enemy! 

And note, this was not mere ascetic humanitarianism ; for 
you let us gobble up all Austria's allies (whose territories we oc- 
cupied as a matter of precaution at the start of the war) — to pun- 
ish them spectacularly, and warn anyone who would thereafter 
take the weaker side in a controversy against us ! 

You it was who brought all this about! You bullied the 
Muse of History, and the God of Battles could not but fall in 
with your ideas. Why are you cavilling now about the sanc- 
tions of law ? You're simply derelict in your duties. Any child 
can see that! 

Bismarck (laughing loudly) — My dear fellows, this does me 
worlds of good. I haven't of late been turning the old heavens 
about their axis at the decent rate that ought to recommend it- 
self in your opinion to a sober Lord of the Universe ! 

Now, attention! It's my turn. We're not — the more's the 
pity — in those much-maligned dark ages. One has to consider, 
or pretend to consider, public opinion; enough at least to choke 
it off in advance, or inspire it. Our people think they're Chris- 
tian. So, even a victorious war must be justified by seeming 
forced upon us in self-defence. No Albigensian crusade these 

144 



OR MILITAEY NECESSITY 



days commends itself to us. Now of course, though incon- 
venient, this scrupulous tenderness of the German soul isn't an 
insuperable obstacle. A war merely has to be made a people's 
war by providing for the enemy's figuring — whether he will or no 
— in the role of aggressor ! It is only important that we should 
be attacked without visible provocation, and the waves of public 
opinion carry us, conscientiously resisting, peace-loving states- 
men, into the abhorrent war ! The whole country bristles with 
arms! — ^nay, it is an exploding powder magazine. Then — what 
enemy shall escape alive from the Furor Teutonicus? 

But, gentlemen, one can't always hurry up these little provi- 
dential arrangements. The enemy sometimes misses his cue in 
the scene. Sometimes, it isn't the enemy blunders. Read, for 
instance, this instructive document. 

{Bismarck unfolds the so-called ''Ems telegram/' and spreads it 
out flat on the table in front of them) 

It blocks our game for a time at least, doesn't it ? 

That upstart — the grande Incapacitee meconnue, will be 
bound to have his eyes opened. Trying to force our King to 
pass his personal word that no member of his family should con- 
sider a unanimous invitation to any throne in the wide world — 
that was going too far ! As became his dignity, our master stood 
his ground, and firmly refused, and politely denied the ambassa- 
dor of the French further access to his royal person on this ques- 
tion. Let us drink, then, gentlemen, to our diplomatic succeess. 
One victory at a time. Sober second thought has one more 
precious chance, and the regime of prudent courtesy is 
reinaugurated. 

Von Moltkb {striking the table with his fist, and pushing back 
his chair with disgust) — Donner wetter! And the beast won't 
have to apologize? We must wink at his palpable intent to 
humble publicly our sovereign, just that he might toss a sop so 
to the Paris mob? {Looks utterly indignant and discouraged) 

145 



THE DOCTORED TELEGEAM 

Bismarck — Can I help it? Have you forgotten our magnanimous 
King's invincible reluctance to be dragged into war against his 
brother of Austria? To be sure, once his fighting blood was up, 
all went well; and your mobilization and tactics won a swift 
triumph. Seven weeks — and -finis to that chapter of world-his- 
tory. It's the first move that costs. {Turning solemnly to Yon 
Moltke) 

As a matter of strict business, are we equally ready to-day for 
a greater task ? 

Von Moltke — ^We are. 

Bismarck {smiling) — ^Victory is organized — fore-ordained? 

Von Moltke — ^We can almost indicate the battlefields to the 
square mile, and set the dates to a day. 

BisjviARCK — Done, then. Let me have that document again. Be- 
fore I use my discretion to send it to the press — letting the 
whole world know what transpired between Benedetti and our 
august King — perhaps we may improve the style a trifle. 

Von Moltke — You will venture to doctor it ? 
Von Boon — It's only a news dispatch. 
Von Moltke — ^Shortening the thing won't improve it. 
{Examining the now altered telegram) 

Von Boon — Not at all. Very clever. Run the two parts together, 
and we get quite another sense : Benedetti demands evidently an 
irrevocable pledge; the King flatly refuses and dismisses the 
ambassador. 

Von Moltke: — ^Ah, I see, this is much better. Before it sounded 
a parley. Now it trumpets a challenge. But will that suffice? 

Bismarck — The press to-morrow will do the rest. It will be like 
a red rag waved at the Gallic Bull, and the bull will paw and 
snort and toss over the milk-pot with one crooked horn, and who 
in heaven's name will care so very much what cat laps up the 

' milk? 

146 



OR MILITARY NECESSITY 



{Von Moltke and Von Boon still stare at the paper incredulously) 

Von Moltke — If s too good to be true ! 

VoN" RooN — The misconception you create will be corrected. 

Bismarck — No, no. The Paris mob will goad the government of 
demagogues; and they will force the hand of their pasteboard 
emperor; and he, for his upstart dynasty's sake, will, in spite of 
his better judgment and the unpreparedness of his forces, be 
compelled to declare war on Prussia ! And then, my bully boys, 
we'll simply have to fight, and might will make again a new 
chunk of right in this old world ! 

Von Roon (drawing a deep sigh of relief) — ^Our old God isn't 
dead yet ! We sha'n't go to our graves in disgrace ! 

Von Moltke — If I live to lead our armies in such a war, by 
heaven, I give the devil leave to fetch away my old carcase when 
peace is declared. 

(BismarcVs face changes to solemn gravity — he rises slowly 
from the table, folds up the blue-pencilled telegram) 

Von Roon — What's the matter? Are you ill? 

Von Moltke — Is this your funeral, or rather your iSt. John^s Day 
bonfire ? 

Bismarck — Oh, I'm merely thinking. All this glee over a suc- 
cessful bit of editing — ^because we so fabricate a casus belli. . . . 
You men of the sword are children ! 

VoN RooN — ^Do we not thank God that we have you to guide the 
state ? 

Von Moltke — ^Will we not seal all your legal documents with the 
red seals of success? 

{Bismarck shakes his head, walking over to the far edge of the 
stage) 

VoN RooN — One of his queer fits of the blues. 

Von Moltke — ^He's like a cavern underseas, full of monstrous 
mysteries. 

147 



END OF SECTIOlSr TEN 



{Bismarck soliloquizes) 

I wouldn^t have them otherwise. It's the nature of the beast 
of prey; claws and teeth aren't for glitter only, but business. 
Every worthy fellow wants his niche in history. But my God, 
should the day ever come when some monarch rules in Prussia 
whose policy lacks in sense of proportion, whose minister lacks 
the strength and courage to resist under inordinate pressure; 
and a policy is inaugurated — not of national interest, but mere 
power and glory for their own vain sakes ; and then the military 
arm strikes at the heart, and the head? . . . Heaven forbid! 
That shall never be in Prussia if I can hinder it. I shall thor- 
oughly educate the heir of my system. 



148 



XI. 

BITETHE-MARROW AND OUR BILL OF 
HIGH TAXES 



XI. 
Scene III. of the Bismarck: Puppet Show 

Uncle Sam — Muse, if you don't whip to the pith of this Prussian 
pother and skip a dozen acts at least, and get the sap of human 
interest to flowing freely, I'll kick your Bite-the-Marrow off the 
boards. 

Muse of History — I'll only exhibit my hero in a few characteris- 
tic poses. His interview, for instance, with the beaten Emperor 
of the French; his education of the heir to his system and his 
dismissal; his ironic consolation by his principal enemy — the 
'^English woman"; these little characteristic scenes should prove 
interesting. 

Uncle Sam — Pshaw, cultivate criss-cross, caticorner reading of all 
heavy literature. Shoot down from northeast corner of the 
page to southwest corner, and then up from southeast corner to 
northwest comer; one word to a line suffices you to skim the 
golden cream of the matter, and leave the blue milk to specialists 
in boredom. 

Muse of History — Every one his taste, Sam. You deserve to be 
fed gritty chunks of embalmed beef. In real life every moment's 
not a thriller, nor every incident a cosmic cataclysm. 
(Enter Bismarck, pacing up and down, and stopping now and 
again to pet and talk to hi^ mastiffs) 

Bismarck — He is gone mad, stark mad. Thou mayest well ask 
who, with thy faithful dog eyes fixed on mine ! It is he, even 
he into whose hands I, thy master, placed the supreme power 
— providing for no checks, so confident was I of his heredity, of 
his education. You doubt? I don't wonder. It's too terrible 
to be true. Ha, ha ! "No man can ever be a soldier" — says he 
solemnly (mind, he's not joking), to his sons at their first com- 
munion — "unless he be a good Christian" ! What then of Alex- 
ander? Epaminondas? Scipio? Omitting allusions to Caesar 
and Pompey? They cut quite a swath of dandelions I should 
opine. 

151 



BITE -THE-M ARROW AND 



And to think of it, this jolly lunatic can, in one insane 
moment, upset the equilibrium, and turn forces loose that will 
destroy all my long life of cruel audacity, tempered by cruel self- 
restraint, created for the Eatherland. Up and down, all over 
Europe, ay to the antipodes, he talks and talks of the Day. What 
Day ? Is he Gabriel trumpeting the judgment ? ^'^Get yourselves 
remembered forever like Attila and his Huns/^ That's it. 
Scare the Chinese to the millionth generation to secure their 
preference in trade! 

Truly, truly the voice is the voice of Kant, but the hand is 
the hand of the Florentine, when he cooks the dish for the great 
feast. Hiss, and call all the eagles together ! What a diplomatic 
orgy! Rob Nippon of her easy conquests over China. Then 
sick "Slav peril" on "yellow peril,'' — and let them trounce each 
other to a grand finish. Pour a little naphtha into his internal 
economy and encourage political arson, to keep the Slav from 
taking undue notice on the frontier. That all helps to squeeze 
the Gallic stocking. Good. Then browbeat and bully the 
French. As for Albion, she undoubtedly won Malplaquet, Tra- 
falgar, Waterloo by perfidy. So encourage the Boer with cheap 
telegrams, and suggest help you won't extend. By this you get 
Britain loaded with debt and properly humbled at no cost to you. 

But the masterpiece is this friendship with the unspeakable 
Turk. Own the Sheik-el-UUa, and you can wrest the two great 
Colonial Empires from their stupid possessors by the preaching 
of holy wars you don't have to finance, till the Persian Gulf's a 
Prussian foot tub. 

By all the devils, he has got my lessons letter perfect after a 
fashion, damnably well; but he ruins all by declamation, pose, 
spotlight. He'll get caught putting the match to the train, yet, 
in a melodrama, and end as an international Guy Fawkes ! 

I wrought for the day when the German should cast off the 
alien yoke of Greece, of Rome as of France, of Britain ; and other 
yokes, besides. Some day that fin-de-siecle rottenness, that ef- 
feminate melancholy, that plebeian servility, that hypocrisy of 
love and peace, which infest modern civilization, must pass away ; 

15^ 



BILL OF HIGH TAXES 



and we shall once again set foursquare men on this earth : mas- 
ters, fearless despots, aristocrats in Prussian uniform — and 
obedient ordered masses inspired by pride in abject subjection to 
their world-wide purposes. Then we shall perhaps, under new 
names, enthrone our race-religion in our souls, and Thor and 
Odin shall be lords of all mankind through us. 

Something like this have I dreamed ; and we should owe it to 
our central compactness, our exposure to attack from all sides, 
our integrity, and our faith above all in the genius of the Ger- 
man. Our philosophy, our poetry, our music, our morality, our 
statecraft, should create a spiritual empire over mankind for 
the noblest race in Europe ! 

But all this will the madman lose; ay, and his place too in 
the sun, which he got by the momentum I imparted to the 
machine. 

The stupendous increase at home of wealth and power, the 
hoarded fruits of diligence and disciplined intelligence, the stu- 
pendous expansion abroad — our race infiltering our culture with 
our blood into every people — all this goes down in the Valley 
of Decision up which he drives the peoples of the earth. ^'On to 
Armageddon,'^ the madman cries, '^for fatherland, and for the 
Kaiser, the Elect of God!" Oceans of blood flow, and then 
squalor, starvation, oppression and the shame of a successful 
proletariat revolution ! 

He is mad! And it was for this debacle in the end that I 
withstood his predecessor, when he would have accepted an 
elective crown ? to have this man wear a crown by right divine — 
a crown I forged, and bestudded with jewels — products of my 
brain-anguish, and sweat of my genius? 

Where, pray, is his Moltke? his Eoon? Where, by Valhalla, 
is his Bismarck, at his side to keep his ears open to truth, his 
conscience quick, and his will subject to the true commands of 
Fate? He has only such men at his beck and call as commend 
their mediocre talents to an insane self-conceit by Byzantine 
servility. 

153 



BITE-T HE-MARROW AND 



He is the God who decrees the new beauty. He draws the 
fashion-plates for the Ol3rmpians, and Teutonic sculpture is 
supreme. He is the God who decrees the new goodness. What- 
ever the drill sergeant willeth in the hour of his drunkenness — 
that is virtue; and what nation it oppresseth — on pain of mas- 
sacres and indemnities, and minster ruins — that is God's merci- 
ful dispensation of love to them. Ho, he is the God who de- 
creeth truth also. It is what We dictate, what We manufacture 
for loyal credulity! We make the new logic at Essen so that 
contradictories agree in our mouth, and facts become malicious, 
fiction in the teeth of the foe! Shall all the nation catch his 
madness? Millions simultaneously insane? And shall such 
madness prevail? 

Ha, but at the least he shall not be able to extirpate my 
memoirs. They constitute the patriotic document which shall 
bear witness that at least it was not I willed the world-ruin 
this madman hath conjured up. They shall know, the people, 
who has betrayed them for to strut and to pose in the star-part 
of a cheap melodrama. 

Rage burns my very inmost soul. 

{iWilliam II. enters during last speech, pulling his moustache^ 
and scowling at the whole horizon, as if practising for the vil- 
lain's part in a scene. Catching sight of Bismarclc, he addresses 
him with condescending cordiality) 

William II. — Ha, is it thou, teacher of my callow youth? Did 
I not learn well by rote thy lessons ? Hear me recite : "Outside 
opinion of our imperial policy is of no consequence. Call our 
gainsayers interested falsifiers^ envious slanderers! But — pro- 
pitiate the pious moral sense of our own people. Our policy is very 
righteous, although hard and exacting; indeed, the very will 
of God, kind to his chosen people, whom He would see perfect 
in virtue. We nurse our strength on land and sea, and accumu- 
late war treasure and equipment — ^because we are gentle dreamers 
and desire leisure and repose. But the enemy, alas ! is so easily 
provoked, cunning and unreasonable. He cannot be pro- 

154 



BILL OF HIGH TAXES 



pitiated by uttermost patience and tender solicitude for the com- 
mon interest; he must, therefore, be held in awe. When he 
doesn't answer your purpose, with your people, as an irritant, 
and they begin to protest against discipline and exaction, why, 
rattle the sword, while emitting unctuous praises of peace. 

^Toster the foe's resentment of bygone wrongs, carry it to the 
right pitch, and call the world's attention to these inexplicable 
fits of passion — most dangerous to the peace-loving neighbor. 

"When the right hour strikes to get room on earth for our 
teeming population of heroes, make the enemy appear the ag- 
gressor, wickedly greedy, treacherous, truculent, a conspirer 
with all the outcast nations, the base-bred hordes and the de- 
generate races ! 

"Get the conscience of the civilized world, by assorted and 
edited misinformation, to ache on your side against the per- 
nicious activities you have secretly or indirectly instigated.'^ 

Thus you see, old teacher, I can get up a detestable war 
of conquest, as an innocent one of seK-defence, and unite so 
my mighty people. Teutonicus imperator contra mundum: and 
the will of the only God, the omnipotent God of the Germans, 
shall prevail, and his Kingdom come on earth — as it is already 
in heaven. 

I have studied your doctrine profoundly, so you need have 
nothing on your conscience, to make you leave your rest, and 
haunt the living. 

Bismarck — I marvel not thou findest my apparition unwelcome, 
as was Samuel's of old to Saul. I strove only for national 
union and integrity. 

William II. — And I drew from thy conclusions as my premises 
the glorious deduction — "world-subjugation by the custodians 
of the ideal"— that is, by US. The German is the only male 
principle, the Celt and the Latin, the female. And God said: 
Let us have a new race of men ! 

Could your statesmanship foresee, or dare, an end like this? 

155 



BITE-THE-MAREOW AND 



Bi&MAEOK — The apocalypse of Antichrist! I forged a great 
weapon, the Empire, for an Antonine. 

William II. — And, behold, a greater than he is here. 

Bismarck — ^Ay, Nero redivivus, fiddling to the world-conflagration. 

William II. — Frederick, my ancestor, fluted, sir! 

Bismarck — Too true. But you have drummed and tromboned 
and cymballed, the one-man orchestra of a hundred-armed 
mountebank ! That is vast progress. 

May I not arouse your virtue by wrath? 

William II. — Bah, you are a contemptible, disgruntled old man. 
Because I have brought greater things to pass than the poets and 
prophets of your generation dreamed even in their beer. . . . 

Bismarck — Thou hast got the German eagle lessoned in crowing 
by the GaUic cock ! I tell thee, await not the end ere thou re- 
pent. For I have come to warn thee, before it be yet too late to 
avert thy total ruin. 

William II. — ^Avaunt, dead bird of ill omen! I have been over- 
patient too long. Ungrateful hanger-on of my august and su- 
premely great grandsire. . . . 

Bismarck — ^Whom I compelled to reign, ruling faithfully in his 
name and interest! 

William II. — The lie of a vampire ghost shall not stir up the 
wrath of the Lord's anointed. I do safely appeal to history. 

Bismarck — Thou that makest history ! 

William II. — I alone can interpret it infallibly, being the live 
coal at the core thereof. 

Bismarck — Thy insane self-conceit, which made me leave thee to 
thine own devices, lest I marred my record of perpetual successes 
with disaster, which thou wert about to make inevitable. . . . 

William II. — There is not room on one earth for thee and me. 
Off with thee, croaking carrion-crow ! 

156 



BILL OF HIGH TAXES 



Bismarck — The ghost of Bismarck is more real than the flesh and 
blood pigmies of thy machine-made day. 

William II — Help! Help! I ache in my bones! I dissolve, I 
fade away! Here, Sam — some poems, supreme masterpieces, I 
wrote for you. Ah, my crown, my imperial crown, the sceptre 
of my world-rule ! 

{They fall at the feet of Bismarck, William II. having writhed 
and faded out) 

Bismarck — Better so, at the feet of the ghost than on the brows 
and in the hand of a vain fool. 

And yet, how I did love thee ! Thy frankness ! Thy insane 
courage ! Thy proud rectitude ! Ah, to see thee and thy five sons 
walk abreast — six beplumed soldiers — ^my old eyes filled with 
tears. Who hath wrought this havoc, and so pitiably destroyed 
the heir of my system? 

Roon ! Moltke ! All our great work fails us because the great 
man begets not his equal ! 

Thou crown, thou art now a lie; for the aristocratic prin- 
ciple perishes. Treacherous heredity! Impotent education! ye 
guardians of the sceptre. Yours, not mine the Sin. What shall 
a ghost henceforward do with these? To whom shall he be- 
queath their custody? Let the crust of the world crack, and 
the fiery centre pour out its fire-floods! Titans breed dwarfs, 
take notice! and sane geniuses, paranoiacs! It is enough! 
Let me begone, woe^s me, to the nouler past of unshaken faith 
in privilege and primogeniture, the past of honest grandeur in 
character and valiantly conquered glory! 



157 



XII. 

BITE-THE-MARROW AND THE FATHER OF 
HIS COUNTRY 



XII. 

SCE^TE IV. OF THE BiSMARCK PtJPPET ShOW 

Muse of History — (entering upon her own scene as Witch of 
Endor) — Ay, there was the flaw of thy reasoning, poor ghost. I 
advise thee, leave these baubles to my kindly care. 

Bismarck — ^And thou wilt dispense them — unto whom? 

Muse of History — The worthiest in each generation, for the 
Spirit singleth whom it listeth for greatness ; or wilt thou insist 
on the glory of the degenerate ? 

Bismarck — But are not men like cattle ? 

Muse op History — ^Ay, there thou erredsi By oppression of the 
masses, through iron discipline, thou throttlest genius in the 
cradle. 

Bismarck — ^Bah, the true Hercules chokes the snakes with his in- 
fant fists ! 

Muse of History — But the brutal tyrant or the versatile fool, by 
right of primogeniture — the accident of birth insuring his cor- 
ruption thro' sycophantry — thou investest him with the heritage 
of the patriot and sage ? The strength of thy man-made machine 
of men, run on the rules of the stud, secures the destruction of 
the people whose divinely ordered state thou didst make it to 
appear. 

Bismarck — My punishment, if thou speak sooth, witch, is great. 
But shall no eventual good result from all my sacrifices? The 
years spent in the affairs of others whom I strove to aggrandize? 
The years in which I humbled my straightforward soul to play the 
spy in alien courts ? The years of ignoble traffic in stolen secrets 
and documents; ay, worse yet, the years spent in condescending 
to bottle-feed the conscience of the pious with lukewarm 
skimmed milk, watered for babes? And all this to force victory 
three times on a scrupulous humane Hamlet, and unity and de- 
cision on a nation of Hamlets; that a madman who cries '^ME, 
and God," who dares to write (and not laugh), "God has indeed 
supported thee brilliantly, my son," should sacrifice to his child- 
ish pride and vanity our great Day that was to dawn at last, 

161 



VOIS^ BISMARCK AND 



blessing the whole earth with German sunshine. And he brings 
on instead the shattering Dusk of the Grods ! 

Muse of History — Nay, nay, that is not so. The end of the world 
cometh not, nor sliall the true sun fail of his dawn. You shall 
save frivolous, light-hearted France. You shall impart of your 
virtue to her. Behold her, silent, stalwart, modest, resolute, ter- 
rible, sublime ! You shall save hypocritical Albion. The spirits 
of Shakespeare and Milton shall purge her. Eeconsecrated to 
public ideals shall her people be; reinspired to heroic sacrifice. 
Ay, and England shall be all her people — ^not one class, that 
monopolize wealth and station. England shall be tiie single- 
minded, high-hearted, God-chosen of every class : 

Frpm mine, from mill. 
From croft, from slum 
Shall her saviours come, 
Whom the Spirit shall fill! 

Behold; Iron Chancellor, thou didst not labor in vain. The 
shams, the shames, the futilities, the snobberies, the knavishness, 
ay, the base selfishness — are burned up in the conflagration ; and 
they twain, thy enemies, stand in the fiery furnace noble, purified 
nations, imperishable, beautiful. 

Bismarck — tShall I have saved my enemies, whom my heart never 
basely hated, but the land that I passionately loved, shall I have 
cursed it with a curse ? 

Muse of History — Nay, thou shalt have blessed thy Fatherland 
ever more. For by circuitous paths already She approaches for 
whose dispensation thou hast made ready thy people. Behold, 
it is Liberty, the daughter of Sunshine, that maketh the desert 
to blossom as the rose. 

Bismarck — Thou meanest the rule of the rabble ? Where then be 
my kindred — the men whose blood is fire, and whose thews are 
iron, whom I set in the seat of the scornful forever? 

Muse oy History — Ah, countless shades gather about thee, strick- 

162 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



en of their great folly, and lamentable — that would accuse thee 
of their downfall. 

BiSMABCK — Them I can hold at bay ; but my country — the kitchen- 
garden of filthy political dreamers ? 

Muse of History — Ay, the Kants and the Goethes, the Schillers, 
and the Beethovens, and their greater sons, shall dispense joy 
and wisdom, and purity and sublime serenity. There shall have 
come new and greater Steins to serye them as enlightened 
statesmen. 

Bismarck — Ay, I see, and the ooze will swarm with maggots ! My 
God, is this writ down in the Book of Fate ? 

Muse of History — Thou didst confess no mere man could see 
into the hand of Destiny, and read her cards till played. 

Bismarck — Then shall the game cease. I will shatter thy flimsy 
booth, Beldame History ! Shift for another ! The Play is ended. 
Rend it, my mastiffs ! To tatters with it ! 

(The booth collapses, hut when the puppet figure of Bismarch 
vanishes, with its destruction, there looms, colossal, a figure 
that grows clearer and clearer, each hand resting on a huge 
sphynx-like mastiff, the flaming eyes fixed basiHsk-lihe on Un- 
cle Sam) 

Uncle Sam — See, Benny, he thinks he's really important because 
he spreads himself thin over half the sky like an electric ad- 
yertisement. But sic semper tyrannis — whether they be Georges 
or Billies! Virtus sola invicta. Mine, you understand. Deo 
favente — perennis — ^the pile of my building! Aut haec — aut 
rmllus — Liberty ! E pluribus Unum, An7iuit coeptis. Joye nods 
on our new start, and by Jiminy and Vercingetori, whoever the 
old Gaul was, we'll institute the Novu^ Ordo Sacclorumf And 
bounce all varmints that aren't stuffed and bug-poisoned. 

If all my ancestral Latin won't make him vamoose, I guess 
he's a fixture. I'll improve the opportunity for a little curtain 
lecture to his face. 

163 



VON BISMARCK AND 



You're a fraud, old Bite-the-Marrow. I expected to have 
you put through all your paces for me. You were to have ex- 
hibited your magnanimity with the vanquished Third Napoleon, 
author of a Life of CaBsar, and all your sweet reasonableness 
with Thiers ! And you never even pawed the air ! 

What of that nice exquisite scene in which your properly 
schooled scion of the imperial line of High Taxes retired you 
daintily to private life, on the shining toe of his spurred boot? 
And that delicate thriller, in which the magnanimous empress- 
mother offered you her sympathy, and her kind offices with her 
bumptious offspring — which you had taken such excessive care 
in advance to render of none effect? 

I tell you, you're not a good sport, Bite-the-Marrow. You 
shouldn't smash the booth to smithereens, because the game be- 
gins to go against you! You know I rather like you after a 
fashion. You were a full-blooded genius, if you were unluckily 
born a titled brute of a bully — so you couldn't help putting your 
confidence in princes. But one can be kicked by a mule, you 
know, and not suffer in one's honor. A bepurpled mountebank, 
his chest like a Christmas-tree, the electric-lit victim of a sys- 
tem of unearned privilege, he just had to behave as he did. 
There's no use keeping up a grudge, black as Tophet, against 
liim. And think how magnificently he's helped me out — de- 
stroyed all the prestige of tin-soldiering, consigned crowns and 
sceptres to the pawnshops and the museums ! 

Now, suppose you take a constitutional in the Tuileries, and 
a preamble among the ruins of Baalbek ? We've got to clear the 
scenes here for important up-to-date business. 

He doesn't budge, Benny. This bouncing silhouette, this 
lantern-eyed Matterhorn, takes no gentle hints! How, do 
you suppose, can I induce him to realize he's a back number, and 
needs badly a bath in the Styx-mud, and a little draught of Lethe 
beer, or a Nepenthe shampoo? 

Benjamin Feanklin — Methinks, nephew, he calls your attention 
scornfully to a gypsy dame in Phrygian cap, who offers you a 
bargain sale of her pack of specialties. 

164 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



(The gypsy shows her face to Benjamin Franklin as the absent 
Goddess of Liberty, but fastens her mask so that Uncle Sam 
does not recognize her) 

Uncle Sam — ^What truck have we here ? 

Gypsy {in a feigned voice) — All the stock in trade, son, of easy 
democracy. 

Uncle Sam — ^Who told you my supply was running low? 

Gypsy — Oh, the best appliances will wear out in time. Think of 
it! Four generations since we set up housekeeping! And a 
widower has peculiar difficulties. Hired housekeepers are not 
always careful. It is said they stimulate trade for us gypsies. 

Uncle Sam — I won't buy a thing. 

Gypsy — Then at least you'll examine, and get self-knowledge. 
Here's the full dinner-pail: made one president — my old cor- 
nucopia revamped. Here's whitewash: beats tooth-powder; just 
a magic thimble-full of it expands to a barrel when you begin to 
apply it liberally to your trusted friends. Here are labels: any 
goods sell with these, if you lick the carefully sweetened 
aseptic glue. Here are freak issues: to divide the fools, and 
give the smart man a chance. Here are planks : smooth-planed 
and extra-waxed, for platforms, to slide off from when they're 
weU laid ! Here's drastic legislation a la iSt. Anthony, welcome to 
Puritans: to make vice interesting. And here's the real excuse 
for it, immunity, in pink package, for sale: to swell the funds 
for a good business administration of city affairs. Here's queer 
reform-fads : to make new reputations ; and prosecutions : to keep 
the yellow journals in news, and guarantee the escape of reput- 
able corruptionists. Here's a water-witch: can tell you where 
gurgle the secret springs of political refreshment ; and the foun- 
tain of eternal folly for chronic candidates. And, best of all, 
here's a handy guide to Success. Let me read you some of the 
most applicable maxims : 

^'Every citizen mind only his own business." 
"Nothing is your business but what pays you." 
"Professionals must run the government — for what's in it." 



165 



VON BISMARCK AND 



"Big business makes it worth while to serve the i^eople/' 

"The people are told what's good for their health, and the 
advertiser pays the bill." 

^'Appeal is made to public opinion, which, heard through a 
licensed megaphone, becomes the Voice of God/' 

"Public interest soon flags — particularly if you provide inex- 
pensive distractions." (N. B. — ^See our toy department 
for rattles and bugaboos, guaranteed to keep the babies 
cooing.) 

Unclb Sam — 'What do you think, Benny, of this whole confounded 

outfit? 
Bbnjamin Franklin — I think the merchandise was manufactured 

to sell. 
Uncle Sam — ^Hardly, for I sha'n't buy. And who is there you'll 

buncoe in the universe if you can't me? 
Gypsy — ^You refuse to sample the wares of Liberty ? 
Uncle 'Sam — ^You're not she, I tell you. I guess I know her; and 

if you pretend to he her, I might forget my manners. 
Gypsy — Don't lose your temper, Sam, because you're short of 

change. It's a useful line of goods, and cheap — for the money. 
Unclb Sam — ^Exactly. The little hatchet breaks, when the fool 

and his dime are parted. Cheap at the price, tho' worthless at 

any. If I'm not misinformed — and who dares intimate that's 

possible? — it's the kind of truck has extra cathedral-spired my 

biggest town with my topmost skyscraper. Can't fool me twice 

with the same patent device. 
Gypsy — -But maybe, if you're so critical, your enemies might like 

some little Christmas remembrances. 
Uncle Sam — Haven't the cash to spend on my enemies; and for 

beggars I've organized Charity on a polymetropolitan scale. 

(Bite-the-Marrow takes out his purse, and throws gold coins at 
Liberty) 

Gypsy — ^Help yourself freely, son. All my pack's yours. Your 
friend in heaven has paid for you. 

166 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



Unci^ Sam — You, Bite-the-Marrow, have the impertinence to 
think I'm dead broke? You sha'n't treat me at my own fair. 
(Throws a package of greenbacks at him that shower bach, and 
the gypsy pichs them up hastily) 

Benjamin Franklin — She has certainly evinced great knowledge 
of human nature, and deserves to be twice paid. 

Uncle Sam (in some anger) — Away with you! (Kicks the 
wares off the push-caH) And look to it, I don't get 
your scalp. (He seizes her Phrygian cap, which he tucks in 
his belt. Liberty flees, clapping on her mask tight with both 
hmids. He kicks the staff about) Now that this little incident 
is done with, I tell you, Benny — I don't like to think it — but, 
though her mouth was full of deceit, something in her voice 
struck a familiar chord. 

And as for you, Bite-the-Marrow, I reckon it was mighty po- 
lite of you to purchase this rubbish for me, but I've had enough 
of your insolent stare and cynical sneer. I can dispense with 
your company on so large a scale. 

Shade of Bismarck — Samuel, let me offer you my services. If 
I must save France, my coxmtry's hereditary foe; and England, 
whence derived all the bitterness of my life — and the madness, I 
tell you of the heir of my system — for he derived the virus of 
insane conceit from the British strain of blood — if I must thus 
glory in my shame, let me crown all so. 

Unole Sam — ^You couldn't do anything for me. 

Bismarck — ^I could clear out that rabble for you. I practiced on 
Poles and Socialists, on Ultramontanes and Alsatians. 

Uncle Sam — ^Yes, yes, and you'd quite incidentally shackle my 
feet and manacle my hands. I believe in democracy. My com- 
mittee can attend to my momentary troubles. And do you sup- 
pose I could get any good from the arch-enemy of my ideals — 
of free opportunity, popular initiative? 

BiSMABCK (from a sneer — gradually assuming an expression of 
siirprise and horror) — ^What, you're not sincere? You believe 
in a regime of fools and idiots and sycophants lording it over 

167 



VO^^ BISMABCK AND 



the intelligent minority because, as you say, they have the 
price? You believe the Voice of the people, out of a political 
graphophone, is the Voice of God ? You too then are mad ! 

Uncle Sam — I ? mad ? Guess not. You're just behind the times. 
Infected with the little Babylon bacillus. By the principle of 
representation we get the intelligent to act for the less en- 
lightened. We have the public school system to raise the 
standard. You ought just to visit my Congress in action ; both 
houses packed with solid genius and patriotic virtue. 

Bismarck — Horrors! A cave of the winds under a Niagara of 
claptrap ! 

Uncle Sam — Democracy has her God-sent prophets to guide the 
debates of her statesmen. 

Bi&MARCK — Phrase-mongers, adulterators of political doctrines, 
place-hunters, brokers in sinecures! You really believe such 
folk can help you? I pity you. 

It is a serious case, and I will be your good Samaritan, Sam, 
in spite of you. The mistake you made was not conscripting in 
industrial armies the aliens as fast as they kissed your shore. 
For officers, youM need much-bullied and therefore bullying na- 
tives. If you hadn't any such disciplined material, you could 
use the graduates of your penitentiaries, and see that they were 
kept well filled by stringent enforcement of the laws. Think 
how, to brassbands and with flags flying, you could have got all 
the dirty work of the nation done cheap ! At one stroke — aliens 
Americanized, and convicts turned into valuable government 
servants ! 

As for your intellectual pretenders, I should adapt to your 
society our method. It has worked miracles. The more intel- 
ligent with us a man is, the surer he is to refuse even to specu- 
late beyond the limits of one particular fenced-in square yard. 
He burrows himself in, and never even casts a shadow like your 
groundhog. Every man a goggled specialist, and every man a 
universal ignoramus. So all the learned citizens become blessed 
idiots in public matters. 

168 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



The concerns of great interest, involving powers of general- 
ization and practical will, they too are settled by a committee of 
experts — rendered dummies, you know, by a subtle application 
of the same principle — and you are the sole dictator I 

So you get the truth on every question — all information 
labelled and card-catalogued ; and you can make great prepara- 
tions for world-movements, while all is done in the open, and 
you alone are in the secret. 

Uncle Sam — ^You're thick-headed and officious. Don't you know 
my own nimble wits can find that needle in a haystack — the 
truth? My little finger's a magnet! My native common sense 
and ingenuity will improvise anything that's lacking, however 
fundamental, in two bats of your old eyelids ! Can't I Burbank 
and Edison you anything under the stars? You're distinctly 
de trop, Bite-the-Marrow, and what's worse, out of order ! 

Bismarck — I yield only to a greater. 

Uncle Sam — What about your Uncle Sam, then ? 

Bismarck — You! You're not even a ghost like me. You're 
just a pitiable bungle! You're a composite political scarecrow 
in motley. 

Uncle Sam — So I'm an animated crazy quilt? See what I'll do 
to you with my little hatchet. 

George Washington, sorry to disturb you, but I guess I need 
you now in dead earnest. Just step up a second and show him 
your fine Houdon countenance, or, better yet, your inspired Rem- 
brandt Peale Scowl, and I tell you, his blood-and-iron physiog- 
nomy will need a little dab of stage-paint at every point of the 
periphery. 

(George Washington steps up, calm and dignified, and confronts 
Bismarck, who fades out with amazed indignation) 

Uncle Sam — Ha, ha, wasn't that just the finest feat of all ! After 
our extraordinary diversion, good madam Muse of History, 1 

169 



END OF SECTION TWELVE 

suggest that yon do the Jack-in-the-box trick back-end foremost. 
Into the witch-kettle with yon, right into the melting-pot. Let 
ns have peace, and a snre-enongh breathing-spell. 

{Muse of History reluctantly moves toward the hoUing pot) 

Muse op History — ^You would boil me alive ? 

Uncle Sam — What you came out of, I guess you can get into. 
As for the temperature, they say you don't feel it much after it 
goes above 500 degrees. Shall I have to hurry you up ? 

(Takes the cap of Liberty as a scourge and threatens her) 

Muse of History — Witness, ye heavens, how this is all one gets 
trying to educate a parvenu Frankenstein. 

(After striking a tragic attitude, am,d cutting a horrible grim- 
ace at him — in which her eyes pop out monhey-heads, and her 
tongue shoots at Uncle Sam like a long flame, she jumps into the 
kettle with unintelligible mutterings) 
Uncle Sam — Hear her curses in Highbrow lingo? Or is it He- 
brew ? Does nobody harm, but Noah's dictionary. Now we shall 
have the dessert. Compensation a la Emerson. 

Presto, my little pot, 

Heave and boil over with roses, 

A lot, and still a lot, 

To tickle our sniffing noses ! 

(The pot begins to rock, then smoke rises in volumes) 

Double quick, or I'll poke you, my Vesuvius! American 

Beauties, mind — ^no other varieties tolerated. Spout, erupt, get 

monstrously busy ! lArmfuls ! 'Cartloads ! 

Ha, the pot obeys. That's what it's for, you see : to boil and 

bubble over with just what I happen to order, red and green and 

prickly, and tickling the olfactory at twenty-four dollars a dozen 

in season. 

Where's the National Genius can hold a candle to your 

Uncle? Not John BuU? Not Chantedar? Not the four Bremen 

musicians on a philharmonic bust ! 

170 



XIII. 

UNCLE SAM'S EPILOGUE TO THE 
PUPPET SHOW 



XIII. 



(Uncle Sam recovers himself, looTcing up and suddenly catch- 
ing sight of the moon) 

Benny, George Washington, see that canyon opening up with 
moonlit grandeur, timed punctually for our delectation ? Who on 
such a sublime continent, susceptible of such celestial illumination, 
has any use for any artistic creed, like the effete people of the 
old country — or of a social philosophy? You just guess and 
improvise little passports to heaven like these, if they're needed 
at St. Peter's gates. Time enough then. No aesthetics! Any 
fool knows what's beautiful when he sees my canyon. No social 
science ! Any fool will know what's wise, when he's up against 
my polychrome ocean of naturalized and home-grown humanity ! 

Benny, you can go now, and be chairman to your committee 
for the pacification, by parley and dicker, of all those malcon- 
tents. Explain to them who and what I am, and that will suf- 
fice, I reckon. 

(Benjamin Franlclin withdraws) 
BENJAMiif — Good-bye, Sam, and be good to yourself. 
Uncle Sam — Never fear. Trust me for that. 

(Uncle Sam watches Benjamin Franlclin withdrawing) 

A good old reliable fellow, he, though a wee bit prosy. But 
it was, just the same, a deep instinct, George dear, made me re- 
fuse to make you a member of his embassy. I apologize for my 
apparent lack of appreciation. I always knew you were more 
than a match for any ; and that colossal Pretender, who proposed 
to have me sneak up the backstairs to despotism, you made him 
dissipate away into innocuous desuetude, or the quintessence of 
the interstellar. If Benny can't manage, I know, at the last, 
I'll resort to you. 

George Washington — How shall I be able to help you ? 

173 



UNCLE SAM ENDS 



Uncle Sam — Oh, by being yourself. 

Q-EORGB Washington — But why are you not— yourself ? 

Uncle Sam — Hang it, George, you're always so serious. Just now 
I'm feeling happy, and sweet on all mankind. By moonrise 
splendor all the horrors of Bite-the-Marrow's absurd proposal to 
reinstate the dark ages like a Paris fashion shall be blessedly 
forgotten. 

(George Washington has quietly turned to go) 

Uncle Sam — Say, stop here, George dear. No insult meant at 
all. I always knew you were something too grandly superhuman 
for imitation ; something we hadn't grown up yet to understand. 
Somehow I know that in you — and you only, because first in the 
hearts of our forefathers — ^we have an intimation of our coming 
race of heroes. You shall beget them through me. And 
Liberty, I feel it in my deepest heart, she shall yet return to 
bear them: the true gods of the Final Age! 

^ Of course I like the lesser fellows of our intermediate stage. 
They're convenient, and don't shame your man-in-the-street, 
and your travelling salesman, and your hayseed pumpkin-and- 
fiugarbeet, and your hog-the-natural-resources, and all the rest 
•of us. 

Old Hickory Handy Andy was our courageous vulgarity set 
io useful jobs, clearing out heirlooms from the garret, and 
making bonfires of dusty, musty prejudices. Poor Eichard, dear 
Uncle Benny, he was our common sense, without which we 
couldn't survive and bring to human fruitage the Jeffersonian 
idealism by which every market garden is to boast of its private 
twins : the tree of life and the tree of knowledge — with no ser- 
pent to pervert Eve. And dear old Abe, with his mystical sad- 
ness, his heartbreaking sympathy, his soul-saving humor — I 
feel him ache in my bones on any damp day ; for wasn't he bone 
of my bone after all? But you, George — Oh, you alone fill me 

174 



THE PUPPET SHOW 



With a shuddering sense of futurity. 
With a nobler, manlier purity. 
With a sane yet godlike security. 

You make me break like the thrushes 
Into song that buoyantly gushes — 
So my face with a great pride flushes. 

my country, thou art most glorious 

For this 'mong the nations of earth: 
That in thee the Spirit victorious 

Shall bring new ideals to birth. 

The soul of the world is not sterile, 
And new power with new evil shall cope; 

So thou facest the imknown peril 
With heroical faith and hope. 

Thou art sure that in season thy people 
Shall beget them their saviours and gods, 

Who the breadth and the height and the deep will 
Make equal, and even the odds. 

Ha, thou daredst the "muck" and the ^^dirt" use 

A sovereign man to mould. 
Compact of the homely virtues. 
New graces ennobling the old. 

Shall my prophet confine then his vision 

To the glories of bygone times ? 
Shall he hold not despair in derision ? 

And the shame of follies and crimes? 

For the mystery sun-golden and holy 

It floateth ever onward ahead; 
And, uplifting to honor the lowly, 

The Unborn — shall yet hallow the dead ! 

Here ends the seventh division of "Uncle Sam: A Satirical Prelude.' 

175 



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